Opinion: A Defense of Graffiti

The right to remake ourselves by creating a qualitatively different kind of urban sociality is one of the most precious of all human rights. We have been made and re-made without knowing exactly why, how, and to what end. - David Harvey, 2003

The Presidential Council on Campus Climate (PCCC)’s unilateral decision to ban graffiti in Reed bathrooms has rightfully drawn condemnation from across the Reed campus community as a blatant abuse of power and a violation of the Honor Principle. Since time immemorial, Reedies have left pieces of their lives on the walls of the college, especially the GCC and the Library, from political calls to action, to party invitations, to grout puns. When I arrived at Reed for Orientation Week and took a campus tour with my fellow first-year students in August 2022, the guide asked the assembled students if they had started exploring yet and if so, what they found most interesting on campus so far. Every single person that I can remember identified either the GCC basement bathroom graffiti or the Library basement Dr. Seuss bathroom as the most interesting thing they had seen at Reed. Not the Canyon, not Audrey Bilger, not the shiny facade of Trillium (which at that point was not as oxidized as it is now), but the bathrooms. This speaks to the innate power of graffiti as a medium to establish spaces that are permeable to human beings, where people feel welcome and like their contributions to the community are invited unconditionally, as exemplified by the unconditioned creative exercise on the walls. 

However, to date, defenses of graffiti at Reed have relied on a metaphysics of substance that views graffiti as an expressive practice, the restriction of which infringes on students’ ability to actualize their internal beings, rather than a constitutive practice that transforms the graffiti artist’s relationship to space. By “metaphysics of substance,” I mean the ontopolitical stance Judith Butler critiques in the first chapter of Gender Trouble, the humanist assumption of “a substantive person who is the bearer of various essential and nonessential attributes” structuring their subjectivity. Butler argues that a more accurate understanding of the human subject’s social being should analyze these attributes, such as gender, as relations “among socially constituted subjects in specificable contexts” rather than characteristic of a presocial core. Like Marx says, “It is not the consciousness of men [sic] that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.” Against a reading of the graffiti ban reliant on the expressive model demanded by a metaphysics of substance, I argue that graffiti is a co-constitutive dialogic practice between the human subject and urban space. 

For many Reedies, it doesn’t come as any surprise to hear someone argue that human subjectivity is a social product, but the argument that space is also a social product, and one that plays a role in producing and reproducing social relations, might be novel. Like with any constructivist analysis, I think that the view of space as socially produced is best motivated by the need to account for difference. By analyzing the social production of space we can begin to provide an account of how it comes to be that certain spaces are restricted to some and opened to others, how people come to agree that certain actors have a right to dictate how space is to be organized, certain people have to implement their decisions, and certain people have to live with it. You know not to open certain doors before you ever see a “No Trespassing” sign.

 The notion of space as an empty venue prior to signification falls apart when we ask how two physically identical spaces can correspond to completely disjunct uses, because there is no way to avoid acknowledging that human social practices give rise to organizing notions of what kinds of spaces we are dealing with. That is something French sociologist Henri Lefebvre thought ought to be subjected to a Marxist analysis. Under the capitalist mode of production, the capitalist class retains the right to organize space as an extension of its right to private property and arranges space accordingly as an immense channeling of bodies into certain socio-political flows in order to reproduce capital. Lefebvre analyzes the social production of space as proceeding according to a three-part dialectic consisting of social practice, representation of space, and space as representation. Graffiti is an intervention into how space is made to represent, which necessarily has effects on social practice and representation of space through the dialectical triad.

It is not untrue that graffiti registers our subjectivities on our infrastructure. More than that, though, the act of making graffiti transforms us as subjects by developing our capacity to make space significant. The graffiti artist encounters the GCC basement bathroom as a taciturn consumer but slips in with a Sharpie and leaves with the knowledge that they can reconfigure urban space to suit their desires regardless of whether admin authorizes doing so. When they have that knowledge, the whole urban world opens up. It is no longer static and imposing, bound to the metaphysics of substance, but dynamic, ever-changing, and, critically, inscribed by human beings, one way or another. It is in the act of writing on a blank wall that one realizes a solid coat of paint is no more natural than any other configuration of the surface.

The message of graffiti to future viewers is completely independent of what is actually written. First of all, graffiti reterritorializes the city from a passive surface to one alive with meaning and therefore invites viewers to consider space’s construction and the tactics used to direct flows of information, capital, and bodies. When you see a tag on an overpass, a freight car, a billboard, or a retaining wall, you know that someone has insisted on leaving a mark instead of passing through spatial channels without a dispute. Second, graffiti invites the viewer to make their own mark because it is a totally unpretentious medium, thereby extending the benefit the artist obtains to the viewer as well. This is why the culture industry is so obsessed with exceptionalizing a handful of graffiti artists as “real” artists against whom a viewer could never hope to compare. 

The program of graffiti is not solely negative. Under capitalism, the city is a highly striated space dominated by market forces, which legitimize their own uses and abuses of urban space and delegitimize any attempt by the people who actually live and work here to make the city their own. The demand to cease making our own modifications to the built environment of Reed is deeper than a suppression of our self-expression; it is a suppression of our self-production which claims further power for admin. Against bourgeois control of urban space Lefebvre argues for the right to the city, which Marxist geographer David Harvey glosses as “not merely a right of access to what the property speculators and state planners define, but an active right to make the city different, to shape it more in accord with our heart's desire, and to re-make ourselves thereby in a different image.” Once you’ve accepted the constructedness of human subjectivity, the only viable vision of freedom is one in which you always have the chance to transform the conditions that produce your subjectivity.