‘Our desires are ungovernable’
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480606065908 |
| Author | Alison Young,Mark Halsey |
| Published date | 01 August 2006 |
| Date | 01 August 2006 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Theoretical Criminology
© 2006 SAGE Publications
London, Thousand Oaks
and New Delhi.
www.sagepublications.com
Vol. 10(3): 275–306; 1362–4806
DOI: 10.1177/1362480606065908
‘Our desires are ungovernable’
Writing graffiti in urban space
M A R K H A L S E Y A N D A L I S O N Y O U N G
University of Melbourne, Australia
Abstract
Our aim in this article is to contribute to the body of research on
graffiti by considering some of the hitherto hidden aspects of
graffiti culture. Drawing on detailed interviews with graffiti writers,
we examine four main themes: motivations for graffiti writing;
thresholds dividing ‘art’ from ‘vandalism’; writers’ reactions to
‘blank’ surfaces; and graffiti’s relation to other types of crime. We
orient our discussion towards the affective dimensions of the activity
in the hope that the words of writers become a visible and
productive presence in urban (and academic) space.
Key Words
affect • graffiti • urban space • writers’ narratives
Introduction
Graffiti exists as a paradoxical phenomenon—as both aesthetic practice
and criminal activity. Its practitioners often vigorously assert its visual
merit and its cultural value. Its detractors recommend its removal from
urban streetscapes and the prosecution of graffiti writers. It has also
become an issue of great significance within public discourse and public
debate. The mayoral regime of Rudy Giuliani in New York City, for
example, from the late 1980s onwards gave defining importance to the
issue of graffiti’s eradication from the subway system in New York’s claims
to symbolic and actual regeneration. In Australia, candidates for local
government have campaigned on platforms focused on graffiti removal
from a municipality (such as the City of Casey in Victoria in 2002 and
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Theoretical Criminology 10(3)
2003). And in Britain, graffiti features as one of the activities targeted by
legislation outlawing ‘anti-social behaviour’ (along with littering, fly-
posting, spitting, public drunkenness and other behaviours).
Academic writing on graffiti has approached it in a number of ways,
encompassing its analysis as sociological subculture, as juvenile delin-
quency, as a historical phenomenon and as a regulatory problem.1 In
addition, there exist numerous books, video games, websites and maga-
zines devoted to graffiti, ranging from hip hop to culture jamming to
stencilling.2 In this article, our aim is to contribute to the body of research
on graffiti by considering some of the hitherto hidden aspects of graffiti
culture. These hidden aspects include: the complex of motivations for
graffiti writing and the sense of cultural belonging graffiti can generate
for young people; the shifting threshold between ‘art’ and ‘vandalism’;
writers’ reactions to ‘blank’ surfaces and ‘clean’ spaces; and graffiti’s
interconnections with other criminal activities. It is these under-researched
issues that render graffiti such a difficult problem, both for policy-makers
(who tend to be unable to banish it from urban space) and for criminology
(in that graffiti seems hard to categorize, since it might be either an illegal
subculture, or an intractable problem for crime prevention, or an index of
persistent juvenile delinquency).
Drawing on detailed interviews with graffiti writers, we wish to ap-
proach the problem otherwise, by focusing on matters of desire, pleasure
and vision in the act of illicit writing.3 On a wall in Melbourne’s suburb of
Fitzroy, someone has written, in a rounded cursive script: ‘Our desires are
ungovernable’ (see Figure 1). We have taken that notion seriously: inter-
views with writers demonstrated to us that graffiti is, overwhelmingly,
about pleasure and desire in the act of writing. What follows is a discussion
of graffiti culture and the risky pleasures it offers its members. Quite
deliberately, we have chosen to focus on the experiences among a select
group of writers. This, of course, limits our capacity to tell the story of any
one writer in-depth or to flesh out the process of becoming a graffiti writer.
However, our contention would be that becoming-writer is, in any case, a
heterogeneous event—subtly yet importantly nuanced for each and every
writer. Our intention in this article, therefore, is quite modest. We wish to
open a space within debate on graffiti through which we might acknowl-
edge the words of the writer as a visible presence in urban space.
Image, sign, affect: writing the corporeal
Graffiti writers—at least those interviewed during our research—recognize
their works form a critical part of the plane of signification investing urban
landscapes. Moreover, writers know that writing graffiti is far from a static
or two-dimensional activity involving simply the application of paint to a
surface. Instead, most understand graffiti writing to be an affective process
that does things to writers’ bodies (and the bodies of onlookers) as much as
Halsey & Young—‘Our desires are ungovernable’
277
Figure 1 The title piece of our article, Fitzroy, Melbourne. © Alison Young.
to the bodies of metal, concrete and plastic, which typically compose the
surfaces of urban worlds. In short, where graffiti is often thought of as
destructive, we would submit that it is affective as well.
The concept of affect has only recently been given serious attention
within criminological scholarship (see Freiberg, 2001; De Haan and
Loader, 2002; Karstedt, 2002; Sherman, 2003). Our main criticism of such
work is that most commentators merge the idea of affect with emotion
(terms which are in no way interchangeable).4 We do not intend to offer an
extended theoretical overview of the development and deployment of the
notion of affect in various arenas. Instead, we invoke the work of Brian
Massumi (1992, 2002a, 2002b) who in turn draws on such authors as
Baruch Spinoza, Henri Bergson as well as Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari.5 Massumi writes that affect is akin to the ‘ways in which the
body can connect with itself and with the world’ (1992: 93). Elaborating,
he remarks,
In affect, we are never alone. That’s because affects . . . are basically ways
of connecting, to others and to other situations. They are our angle of
participation in processes larger than ourselves. With intensified affect
comes a stronger sense of embeddedness in a larger field of life—a height-
ened sense of belonging, with other people and to other places.
(Massumi, 2002a: 214)
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Affect, therefore, has to do with intensity rather than identity. This is
important because it allows questions to be asked not only of writers (what
does it feel like to write illicitly?) but of those who name or respond to
graffiti in various ways (what feelings emerge from encountering graffiti?
How do these relate to the politico-cultural and legal factors which limit
what it is possible to say and do about a particular image?). It allows
questions to be asked of these bodies on the understanding that one is never
just ‘a writer’, or ‘an observer’, or ‘a young person’, or ‘an outraged
citizen’, so much as locales of potential whose subjectivities are made and
remade according to the (social) roles ascribed to them as well as the desire
which invests various networks (familial, residential, pedagogical, cultural
and so on).
To side with affect is to admit that graffiti connects bodies known and
unknown through the proliferation of images. The connection might be a
minor or substantial interruption to one’s sense of the proper, or it might be
a reinforcement of one’s view of ‘the sad state of the youth of today’, or of
the ‘vibrancy’ of counter culture, or of the failure of zero tolerance and
rapid response removal policies. Whatever the case, graffiti as image
connects bodies. But graffiti also forges connections in a way that is largely
unremarked by those thinking and writing about its occurrence. Specifically
and critically, graffiti connects the writer to the city through the very act of
writing since it is this act which places quite strict demands on writers’
bodies (whether intellectually in terms of having to transfer a design to a
less than ideal surface, whether physically in terms of having to put up with
cold, dark or generally inclement conditions for several hours while
writing, whether culturally in terms of feeling the pressure to execute a
good piece that will not be marked up by rival writers, whether legally in
terms of the omnipresent threat of getting busted, whether financially
in terms of what the writer forwent in order to be able to afford quality
paint in the right range of colours and so forth). In the act of writing—that
is, by using the aerosol can and the felt tip marker as key prosthetics for
connecting ‘self’ and ‘world’ (but also as a means of collapsing such
distinctions)—graffiti writers connect themselves to all the possible reac-
tions the city can muster with respect to a particular image or set of images
produced over time.6
Graffiti, therefore, should not be divorced from the event of writing
illicitly. And, more directly, it should not be equated to the cultivation or
search for identity. Fame (attaining the status or identity of a king) is in
many instances important, but, as explained later, pleasure (the intensity of
feeling which, for instance, accompanies the motioning of the aerosol can)
is equally significant. Indeed, our conversations with graffiti writers in-
dicate that writing induces a series of singular moments where identity is
put asunder through the performance of what Deleuze and Guattari have
called becomings-immanent (denoting moments...
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