The Question of Graffiti
Public discourse on graffiti tends to be dominated by one question: Is it art or vandalism? My first impulse, as you might imagine, is to note that we don’t have an either/or dichotomy here, that graffiti can easily both. I suspect that reaction is both too sophisticated and not sophisticated enough.
What I’m thinking, of course, is whether or not an image is art is logically independent of where it is and whether or not it is legally there. The people who pose the question obviously don’t think that way, otherwise they wouldn’t post just THAT question. Still, if you asked them, What is art? what would they say? I don’t know, but I can imagine that someone during the conversation at least some of them would say: I know it when I see it. And some might say: You know, it’s in museums and galleries and sells for lots of money.
That first non-answer is what happens when you try to define art by its content and someone pushes you to the wall on it. When I say that the nature of art is independent of its legal status, that sort of thing is surely what I have in mind. And if you pressed me on it, well, seriously, if you REALLY DID press men on it, I wouldn’t say “I know it when I see it.” But I’d admit there is a problem. What about Duchamp’s urinal? What makes that urinal art, but not all the other urinals in the world?
Which brings me to that second answer: It hangs in galleries, etc. That, of course, is an institutional definition. And it’s a very sophisticated sense of what art is, more sophisticated than most people are on such matters. My imaginary interlocutor is not, in fact, offering such a definition. Rather, in desperation, they’re using museums and galleries as shorthand ways of pointing out thousands of examples of capital “A” Art. And so they point to the institutions that, in the institutional definition, constitute art.
And so we’re back at that question: Is it art or vandalism? If that question is taken as one, not about the images themselves, but about the authorizing institutions, then, YES, it is dichotomous. And the dichotomy is between institutionally authorized and, not merely unauthorized, but entirely outside legitimate society. What I think is that, as ordinarily asked and understood, the question is unclear, indefinite, ambiguous. It is not clearly and explicitly about institutions, but it implies them; nor is it NOT about imagistic content, for the question does implies it.
Social Calculations
The question is a messy one. As is the matter of ‘the social.’ And that brings us back to Latour. As I mentioned in my previous Latour post, he sets up his argument by countering his position against what he takes to be The Standard view. Here’s how he starts that (p. 3):
The first solution has been to post the existence of a specific sort of phenomenon variously called ‘society’, ‘social order’, ‘social practice’, ‘social dimension’, or ‘social structure’. For the last century during which social theories have been elaborated, it has been important to distinguish this domain of reality from other domains such as economics, geography, biology, psychology, law, science, and politics. A given trait was said to be ‘social’ or to ‘pertain to society’ when it could be defined as possessing specific properties, some negative—it must not be ‘purely’ biological, linguistic, economical, natural—and some positive—it must achieve, reinforce, express, maintain, reproduce, or subvert the social order.
I suppose he’s right about that. And, yes, I can see how people would take about ‘the social’ almost as though it were a substance, like icing on the cake. Language does tend to push us in that direction. But the existence of such talk doesn’t necessarily mean that the accompanying thinking is so naïve. But then, Latour does admit that he’s creating something of a caricature.
I say this by way of indicating that, whatever intellectual baggage I bring to this reading, it’s not some notion of the social as reified substance. It’s, if anything, much odder. It’s math, a subject on which my intuitions are deeper than my technical skill.
My sense of society derives from my graduate school mentor, David Hays. Yes, as some of you may know, he taught me some computational linguistics. But his training and orignal work was in sociology. In an article he published in Dædalus (Vol. 102, No. 3: 203-216), “Language and Interpersonal Relationships”, he reports an unpublished experiment he did at the RAND Corporation:
The experiment strips conversation down to its barest essentials by depriving the subject of all language except for two pushbuttons and two lights, and by suggesting to him that he is attempting to reach an accord with a mere machine. We brought two students into our building through different doors and led them separately to adjoining rooms. We told each that he was working with a machine, and showed him lights and pushbuttons. Over and over again, at a signal, he would press one or the other of the two buttons, and then one of two lights would come on. If the light that appeared corresponded to the button he pressed, he was right; otherwise, wrong. The students faced identical displays, but their feedback was reversed: if student A pressed the red button, then a moment later student B would see the red light go on, and if student B pressed the red button, then student A would see the red light. On any trial, therefore, if the two students pressed matching buttons they would both be correct, and if they chose opposite buttons they would both be wrong.
We used a few pairs of RAND mathematicians; but they would quickly settle on one color, say red, and choose it every time. Always correct, they soon grew bored. The students began with difficulty, but after enough experience they would generally hit on something. . . . The students, although they were sometimes wrong, were rarely bored. They were busy figuring out the complex patterns of the machine.
But where did the patterns come from? Although neither student knew it, they arose out of the interaction of two students.
And THAT’s what I believe is at the heart of ‘the social’. It’s an odd sort of game—and it derives from game theory—in which the basic task is simple and the moves are made explicit by the highly artificial material situation, all of which, I assume, Latour would have us take fully into account. And properly so.
Those students were immersed in a complex guessing game. And lots of real games are like that. In games as deeply different as poker and chess part of the craft lies in guessing what your opponent is up to. But then, that happens in ordinary conversation. You’re always anticipating your interlocutor, and s/he you. You may even complete one of their sentences, or two.
But what happens in an antagonistic interaction where you don’t trust the other person? There the guessing can go on and on and on as you try to suss out the angles. These calculations can easily reach a point where they just break down and the interaction collapses, perhaps into violence, or perhaps it just stops and you turn away.
A Three Player Game
What, you ask, has this to do with graffiti? Everything. The writer puts his, or sometimes her, name on a wall. Who’s the intended audience? When Cornbread in Philly did it, the story goes, he was trying to attract the attention of a specific young lady. That others too say the name, that was incidental. When Taki 183 tagged the streets of New York, who did he intend to read the tag? Anyone, I suppose. I also suppose that his friends knew his tag, and that he knew that they knew. So this was at heart a comfortable exchange among friends.
And when a photo of one of his tags appeared in The New York Times, that changed the game. The so-called paper of record took notice, which means society-at-large—‘the social’ reified in a single institutional player?—took notice. Now it was Taki 183, his friends, and SOCIETY. It’s a three-person game. And three-person games are notoriously complex and unstable.
Who sets the rules of the game? In theory, it’s SOCIETY. But if SOCIETY can’t catch you, so what? That’s what’s at state in the game of graffiti: So Bleepin’ WHAT? That’s why the site is so very important. It’s the site the creates the question: What SOCIETY?
That’s what’s so very clever, and very mysterious, about graffiti. It has somehow managed to stage a game in which all of (legitimate) society is compacted, distilled, and reified into a single player in THE GAME. That player is at once concrete, the buff that obliterates the writing, and abstract, the full force of The State behind the buff.
And it’s a game that’s played all over the world. Any graffiti in Antarctica?
Story at 11.
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