Graffiti and Language
By Crispin Sartwell
Foucault and Deleuze, among others, have pointed out that language, and in particular written language, is an instrument or form of power. One suspects, indeed, that to some extent written language was developed to preserve and disseminate the decrees of rulers, as well as to keep records of debts and violations. It is hard to see how one would set up or preserve an elaborate hierarchy, a proper state, without a written language, and though tribal cultures have had a variety of inscriptional tools, they've rarely had anything like hieroglyphics, or written Chinese, or Sanskrit, or English, unless they were subjected to them. Indeed the rise of the state - systematic power worked on a large territorial scale, eventually global - coincides with the development of written language and is inconceivable without it. Much the same might be said of the huge religious hierarchies associated with Judaism, Islam, Christianity, and Hinduism. These have relied to one extent or another on the mystique of text, and a monopoly on its interpretation or even on sheer access to it, as in Catholicism in relation to Latin, for instance. The God of monotheisms, conceived by analogy to human rulers, expresses himself in text, as to Moses: gives laws. World capital also proceeds in the same way, more or less: advertising is largely incomprehensible without text; the idea of franchise, the recognizability of Wal-Mart, trade regulations, even which crops are planted where, the transfer of funds, all depend on textual forms. Science depends on repeatability of experiment, which in turn supposes the careful written description.Technology is cumulative in virtue of its textual encryptions. All forms of systematic power, we might say, are text-heavy, are forms of sentencing.
Our environment bristles with rules expressed in signage. Or consider the tax code, and try to conceive of a system of taxation in anything like the modern sense without written language. "Standard" English is written English as issued by authoritative outlets: the New York Times, for instance, or books published by Knopf. And standard English is a node of power and a flashpoint for power struggles about such things as multilingual education, "official" languages, ebonics. Ebonics is a pretty good example of the whole thing: an oral tradition holding out against written standard English, preserving tribal anachronisms, taking standard English and ripping it up or reconfiguring it, playing with the dictionary to create cultural spaces in the context of incredibly elaborate caste systems and power hierarchies. The standard written language, indeed, has a certain monstrous dead weight: enshrined in Chicago Manual of Style or the OED, always a step behind the living word as it emerges from people's mouths, bearing with it the whole weight of history and law, slow, cumulative, growing behind us inexorably. It yields an incredible profusion of expressive tools, but it also canalizes our expressions through forms of power.
Children are subjected to the written language in the most literal sense. Their education is compulsory. We force their eyes to the linear form, discipline them to it. Much of their "socialization" consists, first, of learning to read, and, second, of what they read and what we say about what they read and what they write: topic sentence, body, conclusion: rigid as possible. The public school is a textual environment: even more replete with written instructions and other messages than the rest of the settled world. The text is the primary vessel of the "shared culture," "our" history, "our" Constitution and codes of law: it's the primary tool by which this "us" is forged, to whatever extent it is forged. And as we forge it in you, we prohibit you from talking.
Text is conceived to be abstract. All the kids in class have "the same" book, thought of as an essence subsisting simultaneously in indefinitely many spatial locations. "The rule of law" is an interesting phrase - odd actually. It attributes power to an abstraction, offloads it from the human body or even any concrete object of any kind whatsoever. It's the repeatability, the reinsciptive or reprintable or cutandpasteable incessant power of the type: the true presence and authority of the Platonic form. "The text" itself is nowhere and hence everywhere; it floats around us like a spirit environment, and flows through us too. Foucault talks about bodies as "zones of inscription," and no doubt the very firing of our neurons has taken on a textual form.
(You might ask, at this point, whether I am setting myself in opposition to text and all its traditions. That would be pretty damn perverse, though interesting. But I can hardly do it since I myself am an author: right now as well as on other occasions. And I am a teacher who demands writing in something like standard English from my students; I correct punctuation, continually. And obviously as well I am a reader, a bit obsessive about it actually; I'm an "intellectual," which means a text person. What I can truly say, however, is that, living deep inside the text I am ambivalent about it or sometimes tortured by it. I find it inescapable, and I do have the impulse to escape or destroy it. But if I associate text with powers I reject, I am also a wielder of those very powers and familiar with their strategies and pleasures.)
If the basic functions with regard to authority of the text are performed by its rigidity - its repeatability from context to context, apparrently without alteration of information - the prestige of the text is essentially a function of its ontological status as an abstraction. This connects it with "mind" in a Cartesian or Platonic sense, and on a social scale with "civilization": mind bloated precisely to the size of a political state. Indeed, the ontological prestige of any given object in the European history is essentially connected to the degree to which it is conceived to be non-physical=spiritual. The savages who are excluded from the written world are insistently, pointedly physical: this is still our mythology of race, for example. It's not really all that false about them, it's false about us, since our own status within the hierarchy rests on a crazed metaphysics for which there can be no evidence. There is, of course a long history in the West of iconoclasm, but understandably as well there is a long history of logoclasm: burning books, rubbing out the laws, defacing signs, and so on, and perhaps the logoclastic tradition is a bit more alive at the moment than iconoclasm, which has a nice anachronistic vibe.
At any rate, logoclasm or the eradication of text is only one possible response. Others work from within, and rest on acts that compromise the abstraction of the text. Pre-eminent among these, I suggest, are poetry and graffiti: textual arts that are also at their essences the concretizing of text. Poetry and graffiti insist that, more or less like everything else that exists, text is particular and physical: that it cannot be separated from the occasion and location and the bristling particularities of its inscription.
Poetry relentlessly emphasizes sound: at a minimum it needs to be read as imaginatively spoken. All the traditional formal elements of poetry - rhyme, metre, alliteration, line breaks that correspond to pauses, and so on - are incomprehensible outside of a conception of text as a representation of the spoken word that allows for the reproduction of spoken language on particular occasions. Surely it originates in bardic traditions of the spoken word and returns us to them through textual media.
Rap is a particularly insistent and innovative example: its medium is the recording of a particular voice speaking its poetry in music. Rap music is in fact a fascinating phenomenon here for many reasons. For one thing, it reconnects the spoken word explicitly to music, both as its context and in its actual performance, which is often a compromise between singing and speaking (cf. Nelly, for example). We might say it is Homeric. It is not, as much pop music remains (though this is less and less the case under the influence of hip hop) the recording or simulation of the recording of an antecedent performance (a paradigm here would be the Lomaxian "field recording" of folk music; another is the rock band, which continues in recording under a performance model), but something that relies on recording as explicitly its material and medium: made initially on turntables, and then through digital sampling. Hip hop, we might say, occupies a site interstitial to text and oral tradition: it is mechanically reproducible, but what is mechanically reproduced is the voice. It has an immediacy that pure text lacks - more trace of the body, we might say - and it uses the forms of ebonics and various other slangs and dialects. Not surprisingly, it is a site of power struggles. Derrida has rejected the view that the written text is a representation of spoken language, and that much seems basically right to me - text is its own animal, though as I say it can perform on occasion as a representation of speaking. And it emerges at least as much from pictorial as oral communication, in the hieroglyph or ideogram. In its fully alphabetic form - rigidified and regularized or militarized, disciplined into the line or march of one-way communication - it is fundamentally distinct both from picture and sound. But the hip hop disc or mp3 is something of a unification of spoken word and publication, now a translation of spoken word into digital information, which is both an apotheosis of text in its effortless reproducibility and an undermining of text as pure abstraction.
Graffiti, though it often employs images, is fundamentally a form of writing, and indeed graffiti artists refer to themselves as "writers." The medium of much of it is the name. The name itself occupies an uneasy or ambiguous zone of the language. When philosophers such as Russell, Wittgenstein, Quine, and Kripke have gives accounts of reference, or the relations of words to the world, they have had special difficulties with names and often had to confer on them a special status or to develop particularly elaborate accounts to work them into the wider theories. Evidently, what a word like "chair" refers to, and the process by which it comes to refer, is somewhat different than in the case of a word like "Crispin." Doing any responsible or interesting account of this distinction or its history would take us far afield, but a couple of points might be pulled out for mention. Russell tried to account for names on the model of his logical theory for general terms or predicates and the existential quantifier. This reverses a long history - explicitly rejected by Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations through a quotation from Augustine, but stretching at least to Plato - in which general terms or predicates were accounted for on the model of names. Kripke and Putnam, among others, have attacked this view. Kripke's account is sometimes called "the causal theory of proper names," and according to it the referential function of proper names is radically distinct from that of predicates, which perhaps can be given some sort of Russell-style account. Names, on the other hand, originate in specific dubbing ceremonies (like when my Mom dubbed me "Crispin"), and are rigid across possible worlds.
Obviously if you don't get all this and you want to, you are going to have to tackle the insanely elaborate history of twentieth-century analytic theory of reference. But what it amounts to for present purposes is this: the relation between a person and her name is a particularly vivid relation, or a particularly intimate relation, or a particularly concrete relation so far as relations of words to the things to which they refer goes. Learning to use the term "chair" correctly is a triumph of the human abstractive capacity because you are learning to construct and deploy into your mental economy and public communicative space a "kind' or universal or Form. But the dubbing ceremony and the use of the name that is parasitic on it proceeds from a specific speech act in the presence of a specific object: it is a concrete utterance on a particular occasion. Then the transmission of the name proceeds by a series of these concrete interchanges in specific oral or written repetitions. The name, we should say, is the least abstract zone of the language, the most specific and concrete of its applications.
In graffiti, the name and the act of dubbing is seized and simultaneously undermined. Most graffiti artists dub themselves with the name they use in their work. In part, this is an attempt to undermine the use of names in the legal system and modes of surveillance: to create a persona that worms its way underneath the forms of textual power. The idea is simultaneously to be hard to identify by power and massively famous outside it: to manufacture an unofficial name that does not appear on the birth certificate or other documents and then to broadcast it as far as can possibly be (to king a line for instance, or go all-city) in a culture underneath the official one. And the means of broadcast is not, essentially or initially, publication or the infinitely reproducible abstract textual form, but in a perfectly concrete inscription: a version of the name that is completely space and time-bound, unlike our imagination of published text, which floats free of all dimensionality. The tag is actually made of paint, unlike the word "chair," which is not actually made of anything. And insofar as it is text it is name, which means that it lives in some particularly particular and concrete relation to what it names. I wonder, for example, whether you feel this with regard to your own name: that it is the text closest to you, that you and it exist in a particularly intimate relation: more intimate, for example, then your relation to words that might pick out your gender, or your race, or the place where you live etc., though all those words "apply" to you.
The history of typography exists in a rather uneasy relation to the general idea of text in the West. Typography treats words as concrete objects, focuses on their inscription at particular spaces. People have expended tremendous energy on the art of typography. Part of this expenditure can be given a kind of ideological reading: the purpose of it is to create maximum transparency to reading, to make the abstraction as effortless as possible, to enable you to forget that you are a particular body looking at a particular page. But people also get caught up in the sensible qualities of type: its beauty, or the appropriateness of its shape for expressing its meanings. There is an aesthetics of text as visual array as well as of significance. These two functions - the sensible and the semiotic - are complementary, but also often enough in tension, because while the semiotic function of text tries to draw you away from the concrete interaction you are having with the screen or page, the sensible can be trying to draw you back into it, or to mediate the meaning through the concrete sensible interchange. Typography, we might say, can enable mind, but it can also operate within a nostalgia for embodiment. This is true of other "arts of the book" as well, such as paper-making and binding, internal and external design. It is true of web design or the design of street signs.
One of the places we see the interaction of the sensible and the semiotic most vividly is indeed in signs and advertisements. Different typefaces can be central to the semiotic effect. You tilt the type right, for example, to convey the idea of speed or the future. You resort to Old English to enforce a sense of tradition or persistence. Or you use the plainest block lettering you possibly can to give yourself a "no-frills" atmosphere, which promises that things are inexpensive, and so on. Probably in every case the communicative trace of written text is effected in a collaboration of typography (or calligraphy) and semiotics; another way to put this is that the two are not on any particular occasion separable. Even in cases where maximum transparency to meaning is the intention, that itself takes up a place within the semiotic interchange that occurs around the text. Every inscription is necessarily a concrete object: a specific object with particular sensible properties, and though these may be blinked or may exist in tension with, as it were, text's conception of itself, it is always part of the situation, part of the construction and the disintegrations of meaning. Berkeley argued against Locke's theory of general ideas - essentially conceived as a variety of mental image - that it was impossible to imagine a dog, say, that was neither a dachshund nor a pit bull not a mongrel, whose hair was neither long nor short, who was neither black nor white nor brown, small, large or in-between, and so on. Any image of a dog in the mental economy of anyone necessarily had a variety of specific features apparently extraneous to the status of the idea as the general idea applying to all dogs. The same is precisely true of text: its generality and abstractness is qualified on every particular occasion by a bristling collection of concrete sensible qualities.
Graffiti is strongly related to the art of typography; indeed, many graffiti artists have invented a repertoire of alphabets, created in their black books and deployed on trains and walls. In addition, they have appropriated lettering styles from advertising, comic books, and many other sources, which they have adapted to their purposes. But it is also worth pointing out some of the differences. Typography proper inhabits - at least apparently - a more abstract zone than graffiti, which is even more insistently focused on the particular inscription. Type faces are expressed as a series of types open to mechanical reproduction. Certain typefaces become standard, and this is a reflection of the basic purpose of most typography to enable standardization and to apply to any number of specific texts in their indefinitely wide dissemination through publication. Graffiti alphabets, on the other hand, are always aimed squarely at entirely specific inscriptions. They retain a handmade quality: they are guides for the hand in producing specific works. The works themselves are paintings and partake of the ontology of paintings: that is, they are specific physical objects. Destroy a copy of Ulysses and the novel persists; destroy the Mona Lisa, the actual specific physical object, and the work is extinguished. Ulysses is pristine: as perfect now as at the moment it was completed: the Mona Lisa, like all particular physical objects, ages and alters in time.
The twentieth century, of course, saw a thousand intersections of picture and text, and thousands of objects that were not clearly one or the other or that were both. That is true of graffiti with special intensity. It inhabits the a particular zone between the picture and the text as rap inhabits a particular zone between the text and the spoken word. Graffiti is essentially the name as particular painting, the text drawn into a physical ontology, a complete merging of type and token. Maybe this is in part a revival of the forms of writing current before Gutenberg, a kind of reincarnation of the scribe. This is true in more ways than one. It is no coincidence that printing coincides roughly with the Reformation, whereas scribe traditions could be associated with texts used for hermetic or even secret purposes in a world of illiterates. The scribal text involved a connoisseurship of visual form and had a magical significance, a particular power that has been lost in the world of continuous publication and compulsory education. Essentially texts were reproduced for particular people, their functions and even legibility limited to certain individuals and interpersonal formations.
The history of graffiti text can in part be written as a history of unintelligibility. The early work - by and large dedicated to the fame of the writer - presupposed legibility as well as a fairly conventional set of lettering styles, especially "bubble" letters. But with the advent of "Wild Style" graffiti in the early eighties - embodied in pieces rather than tags or throwups - letter styles started to became more and more elaborate and less and less easy to read. This is usually accounted for as a shift to a kind of "code" analogous to the most slang-ridden varieties of rap: the idea was to mark off those who could read the lettering as a special group with its own language. To some extent this is certainly true, and one can of course learn to decode various lettering styles, or to associate them with particular crews or writers even where one can't decode them. Indeed, Wild Style graffiti was, fairly quickly, taken up into actual typography and signage styles. But further developments took some writers well beyond any attempt at legibility and into a kind of purely visual play with the word: a systematic fragmentation or disintegration, often arrayed in a perspectival three-dimensional space that was essentially pictorial rather than linguistic. Such developments would certainly be hard to employ in advertising.
The book Taking the Train produces a record of the great graff artist PHASE 2's styles over the decade from 1972 to 1982, as reproduced in his black book.(1) Each of the ten steps reveals a loss of legibility. At the sixth, I would have to look at the thing for awhile to decode it. At ten, it wouldn't matter how long I looked. In the last few pieces, the name literally seems to be more and more torn up; by the last, it is in shreds. In part it thematizes the physical qualities and in particular the fragility of the paper on which it appears.
In the case of PHASE 2, at any rate, this process is magnificently conscious. Joe Austin quotes him as follows:
I'm absorbing and devouring language in its co-existing state and creating something else with it. . . . The English language isn't much, especially in its current state. By comparison (to Chinese and Japanese) it's like a dot. Why not go beyond that and just create an alphabet or language? You can't put a limit on communication or how one can communicate; you've always got to look further; that's how style expanded in the first place. . . . If they really need Western thought, why don't they examine the Greek myth of the alphabet? Cadmus sowed dragon's teeth and they sprang up as armed men. Greco-Roman letters were . . . (regiments) for an imperial, militarized world - social realities that still curse us. (114)
This presents the linguistic approach of graff at its widest scope. First, it connects it with the ideogram and an explicit critique of the alphabet. But the content of that critique is of special interest: it associates alphabetic languages to military and state power in its very structure or visual appearance as something lined up and regimented, thought conveyed as a military maneuver, disciplined in a military style.
Any book that reproduces contemporary graffiti(2) shows that the process of deconstructing the text - at once venerating and destroying it - has proceeded ever since the early 80s at the latest, and has reached a point of astounding refinement and variety. It is now accomplished by virtuosi, people as immersed and well-skilled in their craft as Raphael was in his. There has never been a more elaborate art of text, and there has never been a more elaborate interruption of text. One other element in this, which is also incorporable in the more casual tag, is the intentional use of the drip (poster by Shane Jessup: "DRIPS ARE TOTALLY HOT RIGHT NOW"), emphasizing at once the physical presence of wall and paint. Often you have the sense that you could read what the thing says, except the drips have made it impossible: the word is flowing down the wall, melting or liquefying in the re-emergence in dry form of its liquid origin. Many such works, we might say, depict drips, as do the comic-book versions of gestural painting by Lichtenstein.
It is likely that many of these developments can be accounted for by analogy to well-established structures of mainstream art history. And in fact, about the same time as Wild Style graffiti appeared, graffiti merged to some extent with mainstream art history. Artists such as Dondi, Zephyr, and Futura started working on canvas and getting gallery shows, while many artists also started doing legal murals. Such developments - along with the increasing handskills of writers as they matured - encouraged a culture of virtuosity and an avant-garde structure in which the point was to surpass rather than merely imitate or venerate one's forbears. In addition, these shifts accompanied a shift in basic values from quantity to quality: where before the point might have been to do the maximum number of tags and throwups, which would form the basis of the writer's fame, now the source of fame could also be the writer's artistic ability and stylistic innovations. Before that time (and to some extent this remains true), graffiti deployed more a craft guild structure than a romantic/modernist/avant garde ideology. What was privileged was not the genius or the masterpiece, but the labor. This if often true of arts that are actually in process and vital rather than being monopolized by professional poseurs. And it's a revealing juxtaposition because the two worlds were in parallel in the same city. But at any rate the artboom '80s had a bit of an intersection with the graffiti world, which predictably though unfortunately had more of an effect on graff than on Jeff Koons, who could have used a dose of work ethic, commitment, and craft. And though the incorporation of graff into Soho art turned out to be a brief fad, and galleries dropped artists within a couple of years for the most part, it did manage to help set graffiti spinning into some new directions.
Graffiti went from being words to being pictures of words, and then being the simultaneous incredible elaboration and tearing apart of words. The work expresses both a veneration of text and a very direct hostility toward it: the act of celebration is also the act of destruction. Surely while the typographic and other writing arts have had bits that were extremely elaborate and even hard to parse, there has never been a moment before in the history of text in which illegibility was so explicitly thematized, celebrated, explored, and exploited. Sometimes lettering is consumed in flames, or blown sky-high, or dispersed by the wind, or taken in a hand and shaken out of comprehensibility. Text is merged into picture, but then also compromised toward pictoricity or shaken out of its status as text almost altogether. Nevertheless, the sheer fact that text is involved is preserved: that's not usually the question. The name is still evidently present, only it's buried, sliced, blendered, flipped, folded, twisted, disassembled and put together again in a different order.
Written language has a future, if we do. It's obviously in flux right now: one might mention hypertext and other ways that its linearity is being exploited and compromised. Graffiti, I'm suggesting, shows one way that language is being altered and created, one with particularly anti-authoritarian implications. But like hypertext too, it is constantly being reappropriated into essentially authoritarian systems such as the avant-garde artworld and corporate design culture. It is also undermining these worlds.
Graffiti started out as a crime and graffiti proper (as opposed, e.g. to post-graff design style) remains a crime. The idea of art as a crime and a subversion of order is a rich one historically, but has rarely been quite so pointed. Graffiti is explicitly at its root an anti-authoritarian art, and that fact has informed its history, its look, its practitioners, its surfaces: in short, the medium is incomprehensible without the crime, or: the medium is crime. The fundamental impulse of graffiti is the anti-authoritarian impulse.
What I'm arguing is that this is not only a matter of the sheer fact that the stuff is illegal: it's not just a matter of racking paint and running from the cops. It's inside the form and content of the art itself. This of course is not surprising, and the fact that the fundamental impulse of any given work of art is in some sense visible on its face is typical rather than the reverse. In this case it drives forward a saturated sign system of revolution that attacks the state and the schools by attacking the word, while also reclaiming the word or claiming a place in authority: claiming the power to remake the word and hence the world. We could say that it's an attempt to revamp or rearticulate authority, to read it through a new set of codes, to take control of it and bounce it back and play with it make something of it instead of merely knuckling under to it. It's an attempt to take language back.
1. Joe Austin, Taking the Train (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), pp. 184-85.
2. I might recommend James Murray and Karla Murray, Broken Windows: Graffiti NYC (Corta
madera CA, Gongko Press, 2002), for example: consider, e.g., a wall late in the book, depicted
across two (unnumbered) pages, featuring ultra-Wild Style names by SEEN, CHAIN3, BUS129,,
STAN153, CASE2, BOM5, and EASE, masters all.
