Bruno Latour. Assembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford UP, 2005. From the chapter “Fifth Source of Uncertainty: Writing Down Risky Accounts,” pp. 121-140.
Here’s what I’m going to do this time out. First I’m going to quote from brief passages from the chapter. Then I’m going to return to graffiti, my ‘home base’ for the rest of this post. That’s the only way I can internalize what (I understand of) Latour’s ideas.
Some Passages
p. 122:
If we want to have a chance to move up all the controversies already mentioned, we have to add a fifth and last source of uncertainty, namely one about the study itself. The idea is simply to bring into the foreground the very making of reports.
p. 124:
Since we are all aware that fabrication and artificiality are not the opposite of truth and objectivity, we have no hesitation in highlighting the text itself as a mediator.
As a matter of methodology, sure, talk about how to write a proper account. But as epistemology and ontology ... be careful about being too reflexively clever, no?
p. 128:
To put it very simply: A good ANT account is a narrative or description or a proposition where all the actors do something and don’t just sit there. Instead of simply transporting effects without transforming them, each of the points in the text may become a bifurcation, an event, or the origin of a new translation.
p. 129:
A good text elicits networks of actors when it allows the writer to trace a set of relations defined as so many translations.
p. 136:
No scholar should find humiliating the task of description. This is, on the contrary, the highest and rarest achievement.
For my colleagues in literary criticism, let me repeat these words as though they were my own. After all, describe describe describe has been my mantra and my practice for quite awhile.
No scholar should find humiliating the task of description. This is, on the contrary, the highest and rarest achievement. Again: No scholar should find humiliating the task of description. This is, on the contrary, the highest and rarest achievement. Third time’s a charm: No scholar should find humiliating the task of description. This is, on the contrary, the highest and rarest achievement.
Note, however, that I’m talking about describing texts, while Latour is talking about describing an ontologically heterogeneous network of actors in manifold interactions with one another. Two different kinds of things. But this is not the time and place to discuss the differences.
On the other hand, here’s where I get off the bus (p. 137):
Either the networks that make possible a state of affairs are fully deployed—and then adding an explanation will be superfluous—or we ‘add an explanation’ stating that some other actor or factor should be taken into account, so that it is the description that should be extended one step further. If a description remains in need of an explanation, it means that it is a bad description.
I don’t agree with this. Explanation is always necessary. But it may not always be possible. And THAT, I suspect, is where we are now. Our capacity to describe has out-stripped all our old and familiar explanatory moves. They don’t do any work any more, not in the face of our new descriptions.
That’s certainly how I feel about literature. In the old days, which are still very much with us, a reading or an interpretation WAS CONSIDERED TO BE an explanation. That move has grown tired and stale. The literary Darwinists think they can explain texts by redescribing actions in terms of evolutionary psychology, a move that’s always already stillborn. The cognitivists seem to want the same from their cognitive tropology. Stillborn. Meaning explains nothing.
I’ve been staring at descriptions for years and years. I have hints and clues about things to be explained. And maybe even a clue to a hint or three about what kind of thing might possibly serve as an explanation. But none of that’s very solid. You couldn’t toss it over a swamp and expect to walk over the swamp on it. No, the only hope for solidity right now is in the description of the text.
And I suspect that’s where Latour is as well. When he says ‘no explanations needed’ he means that reference to ‘the social’ in any of its many guises does not count as an explanation anymore. You cannot explain graffiti, for example, by drumming up some theory about social marginalization under later capitalism. Sure, that’s going on. But we knew that before we even looked at graffiti. And intoning that mantra, or some variation on it, or even an alternative to it, that tells us NOTING about the writing on the walls.
The Faith of Graffiti: A ProtoANT Account
The Faith of Graffiti, photos by Jon Naar and text by Norman Mailer, is the best book that’s yet been written about graffiti. I believe that it can serve as a proto-ANT account of graffiti. Actor-network theory, of course, did not exist at the time. And Naar and Mailer were not engaged in social science. They were engaged in cultural reportage and criticism.
And, incidentally, managed to deploy the ingredients of a proper actor-network description. To go from what they did to that proper ANT account one must ONLY provide more of what’s already in the book. That, of course, is more easily said than done.
Let’s start with the photos themselves, for without them Mailer’s superb text is empty. They depict the graffiti itself and, of course, the surfaces on which the graffiti was painted. Many of them also include the wider context, often enough so that you can figure out where the picture was taken. Naar also got some action shots, so wee see writers themselves, and their tools (markers and spray cans).
In a full-dress ANT account one would, of course, like the exact location and the exact time. With modern digital gear time-stamping is automatic and, for some cameras, so is location stamping (via geo-location chips). But Naar took those photos in pre-digital days and he took many of them under circumstances (e.g. running from the police) where making notes about time and place was all but impossible. Still, such things can be inferred and we do know, to the week or so, when the photos were taken. On the whole, this is a pretty good record.
Aesthetically, it is superior. As photos, as visual objects, these are among the best graffiti photographs ever taken. They’re superior to most that I’ve seen, and I’ve not seen any better. Of course, I’ve not seen, and never will see, the vast majority of graffiti photos.
As for Mailer’s text, first, he was with Naar when Naar was taking photos. He talked with the writers and their words are in his text. The title comes from one of the writers. Cay 161 told Mailer, “the name is the faith of graffiti.” So we know, in their words, what it means to them and why they do it.
What of third parties? Well, I took a quick scan through the book and spotted this quote in the margin (p. 14 of the revised edition) “They messed up my property three times. If I catch them, I’ll break their arms with a lead pipe.” Mailer also quotes from a variety of articles in various news media, newspapers and magazines.
And then there’s Mayor Lindsey, Mailer interviewed him and got his views on graffiti. He was against it, but he was also on the way out of office and so couldn’t do much about it. The thing is, he wasn’t simply speaking as a private individual, like Mr. Lead Pipe Arm Breaker. We was speaking as an elected official, a representative of the body politic. He’s just one man, yes, but one man in a special slash peculiar situation. His words have the force of what Latour will call, in a later chapter, a panorama.
Many of the media quotes are panoramic in Latour’s sense. But there’s also some quotes Mailer identifies as being from ‘Chairman Martinez,’ Hugo Martinez, organizer of United Graffiti Artists, a collective that tried to take graffiti legit. Martinez said, for example, “Graffiti writing is a way of gaining status in a society where to own property is to have an identity” (p. 30). Not only is that panoramic, it sounds like what it is, a bit of explanation of ‘the social’ type. Martinez majored in sociology in college (though I don’t think Faith says that; I got it from Gastman and Neelon, The History of American Graffiti).
Nor is that all. Mailer goes to the Museum of Modern Art and looks a graffiti through those various lenses and he also talks about other developments in the contemporary arts scene. He’s got loads of ‘context’ (not a particularly good word in Latour’s world), all particularized through specific examples and comparisons.
The fact is, if you start laying ANT trails outward, star fashion, from what’s in THAT book, you’re going to end up covering a big chunk the world back to the edge of human history—for Mailer makes the now-standard connection with cave and rock art. And that’s if you trace no trails forward in time from the publication of the book. If you allow yourself forward trails, well . . . conjure with the fact that THAT BOOK quickly became assimilated into graffiti society. Writers had copies and passed them around. Some writers got started by imitating what they saw in those photos.
I’m afraid that any would-be ANTologist of graffiti has no choice but to start with that book. Mailer and Naar weren’t sociologists. But they new what they saw and they described it, each with the tools at hand.
Graffiti: Some Jersey City Traces
By way of orientation, Jersey City, New Jersey, is across the Hudson River from Lower Manhattan, that is, across the river from the area where Naar took his photos. When I took the following photograph I was within a quarter of a mile of the site where the Holland Tunnel makes ground in Jersey City:
I’m standing beneath one of the viaducts that takes vehicular traffic to or from the Holland Tunnel and I’m looking roughly Southeast. The light pole at the center of the photo is, I believe, in Enos Jones park or close to it. There’s a tall building behind the leaves just to the right of that pole, though about a mile away or so. That’s the tallest building in New Jersey, owned by Goldman Sachs. It was designed by Cesar Pelli, the architect who did Malaysia’s Petronius Towers.
In a band across the middle of the picture we see buildings with graffiti on them. Just to the left of center you can see the name “Rime.” Rime also writes as Jersey Joe. He’s one of a small number of graffiti writers who makes a living with his art. But he still keeps his hand in by doing illegals, such as that one, as they’re sometimes called.
Now, if you scan down from the middle band and look carefully in the foliage near the center you’ll see railroad tracks. They’re an active freight line of the CSX railroad. The land on which I’m standing is a CSX right of way. It’s illegal for me to be here, as it is illegal for graffiti writers to paint here—they paint on the huge concrete stanchions that support the viaducts to and from the Holland Tunnel:
The graffiti you see at the left wasn’t there two months ago. Well some of it was, and some of it wasn’t. You’re looking layers that have accumulated over a period of years. The black background and the two pieces on it, that’s new.
I’ve been photographing this site for five years and have a rich, if by no means complete, record of what’s happened on these walls during that time. They were, of course, well-painted by the time I found them. But those aren’t the stories I want to tell.
Let’s move to a site that’s roughly mid-way between THIS site and the entrance to the Holland Tunnel:
There’s a variety of graffiti at the bottom of that wall. Notice that painted goal posts at the right and the basketball hoop at the far right. There’s a matching hoop off the photo to the left. The surface in front of the building is thus used as a basketball court and playground.
We’ll get back to the graffiti, but first, take a look at the middle and top of the photo. You can see the remains of Bull Durham ads. The one on the right is for smoking tobacco. What were those ads facing back in the day? Surely they were positioned where they would be seen by men who’d buy Bull Durham tobacco. Here’s the building that faces those ads (notice the hoops to the left and right):
During the middle of the 20th century that building was a freight terminal. It was two blocks long and one of the largest in the country. At the time Jersey City was a port town and this area was filled with railroad yards. At that time that building would have been crawling with men moving fright to and from freight cars. They were the audience for the Bull Durham ads. The railroad line in our first photograph is about all that’s left of those freight yard..
There is, of course, a story about why the freight yards left Jersey City. I know bits of that story, but not enough to retell it, even in brief. Suffice it to say that there is a story, and it’s relevant to the many graffiti stories I could tell, and the many more I have no trace of. Almost all the graffiti I’ve photographed in the past five years, most of which is within a half-mile of these two sites, is either on railroad land, land that once belonged to the railroad, or on buildings that were once served by the railroad. When the railroad left, the land and the buildings were abandoned, though some of the land was rebuilt for other uses.
One could mutter, by way of providing context, ‘late industrial capitalism’ and, yes, that’s what we’re looking at, among other things. The leavings of late industrial capitalism. But just what does that tell us about the graffiti?
Let’s return to that Bull Durham wall. Here’s a shot of the lower left:
Notice the Puerto Rican flags to the left and right. Those are not common graffiti motifs and, indeed, most of those markings, while they are graffiti in the general sense, aren’t graffiti in the particular aesthetic tradition that I’ve been examining, the NewYorkandPhilly to the World tradition. The line between graffiti in general and that tradition in particular is a fuzzy one. It would be difficult, for example, to draw such a line on that wall.
There are a number of names on the wall. To the left of center we see Chello 14. If you click through to my Flickr page you’ll see that NOME TMF made an interesting comment: “chello 14 gave me my first can”. So Chello 14 set NOME TMF off on his graffiti career. Who else did Chello 14 help in that way? How many stuck with it? What about NOME TMF, who did he start off?
Now, let’s step back just a bit and ask: What chain of hand-offs leads back from Chello 14 to those writers whose work was photographed in The Faith of Graffiti? Since those writers were working just across the river, it seems like there’s a good chance that one of them started someone who started someone . . . who started Chello 14.
We’re now playing six degrees of separation with graffiti writers where the linkage requirement is fairly strict: one person must have helped the other get started as a graffiti writer. We could, of course, loosen the linkage requirement to, for example, both have painted on the same wall (but not necessarily at the same time).
I wonder of Chello 14 owns or has seen The Faith of Graffiti? What about NOME TMF? What about a writer who’s only a strong link away from either of them? A weak link away? Two links, strong or weak?
An interesting little game.
Let me add a final move to it. While Norman Mailer is dead, Jon Naar is not. He has a website (google his name, it’ll come up). I found him through that website and have been corresponding with him for a couple of years. Me and who knows who else. I’ve also met him face to face. The second occasion was a panel discussion about graffiti and signage.
That discussion included Massimo Vignelli, a well-known designer who designed the signage for the New York subway system, and Mike 171 and Snake1, two of the writers whose work Naar photographed.
As you read this you are only one weak link away from me, which puts you one weak link from Naar, Mike 171, and Snake1. Naar ran with Mailer, Mailer talked to the Mayor.
So, just how big is the graffiti world?
No comments:
Post a Comment