Seven Red

I’m departing from my purpose of merely discussing styles and ups quite a bit here, but I should respond to some objections and set out the stakes more clearly. I can’t very well fault what I’ve called a “liberal” view of graffiti in the abusive and somewhat offhand way that I’ve done so in previous editions without expecting a response, and thereby being called on to respond. As such, I’d like to set out a few concepts here that might clarify the questions I’m tossing around. That is the hope, at least. So this will be a departure in both tone and content from previous editions. I’ll proceed in three parts: first, I’ll lay out the categories of exit, voice, and loyalty. Then I’ll respond to Cintron’s chapter with these concepts in mind. Finally, I’ll explain why I think they’re important for understanding tag graffiti. In order to conserve my own time, and give you a break, I’ll post only the first part this Friday, with parts 2 and 3 appearing next week.

1. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty in an Immanent Field

I draw the concepts of exit, voice, and loyalty, of course, from economist Albert O. Hirschman’s 1970 treatise of that title (Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States). Hirschman is working out a theory of response, and ways of gauging response in changing (specifically, “declining”) organizations, taken broadly. I’m going to bastardize the concepts considerably here, so apologies to the economists.

Loyalty—Think of loyalty as brand loyalty, or commitment to a firm or political party. If a particular firm is in decline, some members stay attached to it to the bitter end (the Bush 29%, for example, a seemingly unbreakable margin of loyalty). While the proportion of loyalty in a particular situation is important to Hirschman, he’s more concerned with the other two categories.

Voice—Voice can be equated roughly with “resistance” or “dissent.” This goes for commodities as well as for firms and “states.” When employees sense that a firm is in decline, they can stick with the firm and “voice” their dissent with respect to its direction. If a commodity experiences a reduction in quality, consumers can “write in” or complain to the firm. The entirety of protest rhetorics can be viewed as a “voice” operation. Stop the war. I’ll expand this concept here to include “self-expression,” where one develops a voice in relation to the social whole.

Exit—From an economist’s standpoint, this is not a particularly tricky category: consumers experience the decrease in quality, and simply take their business elsewhere. Or, employees notice the decline in a firm, and leave rather than attempting to change the tendency. In states, exit can purportedly be seen in generalized apathy (Baudrillard’s silent majority, the black hole of politics), or in emigration/desertion (Hardt and Negri’s hobby horse).

Indeed, it’s no mistake that Hirschman’s work in economics emerges at the same time as the categories of the “social” worker and political “exodus” are establishing themselves in the Italian Operaio and Autonomist movements, or when the “solution” of the commune is at its height in Western countries. Exit is precisely the problem of global capitalism, precisely the problem of the “real subsumption of labor under capitalism.” If capitalism is no longer operating in relation to an “outside,” if it covers and shapes the whole social field, what can the category of exit mean in practice? On this thorny question, we see even Hardt and Negri’s remarkable work snagged: how do we posit immanence at the same time that we propose exodus? For Hardt and Negri, Empire serves as the immanent field (real subsumption) out of which a multitude emerges, but the paeans to the “deserter” may leave us wondering where (to put it spatially) one deserts to, and the multitude is often strangely positioned “against Empire.” Call this the emigration problem of voice. Indeed, this question was even keenly felt by William Whyte in The Organization Man, who perhaps put it most simply when he noted that the employee may tell his boss to go to hell (voice), and quit in dramatic fashion (exit), but he’s always going to have a new boss. Similarly, the wailing and gnashing of teeth over “co-optation” grinds against this very problem, where not only is it the case that every “exit” is cycled back into production, but exit itself (and voice, for that matter) becomes a species of loyalty in that it is an engine of production/innovation. Call this the open source problem of loyalty.

In my own field of composition theory, these problems  came to a head in several debates of the 1980′s, specifically those between David Bartholomae and Peter Elbow (an insight I’ll attribute to my friend expat of Scooter Nation). To simplify considerably, is it the job of writing instructors to enable students to develop their own voice in relation to institutions(Elbow), or to develop a kind of loyalty by adjusting to institutional conventions (Bartholomae)? These questions had been brewing throughout the structural adjustment period of the 1970′s, and  explode, perhaps predictably, just as the institutions and modes of (economic) being typical of globalization are hardening through the 1980′s. The crisis of the privatized individual in the disintegrating institutional setting can be glimpsed as a faint ghost haunting these debates. Where voice and loyalty come to dominate the scene of writing, we can see the disappearance of that other category. The only position composition couldn’t take was out.

Perhaps the smartest work on this problem comes from Hakim Bey, in his notion of a temporary autonomous zone (TAZ). Bey posits the “end” of the pirate utopia, those spaces like the hidden Caribbean coves of the 17th and 18th century that were both literally and figuratively unmapped by political power (though not, obviously, by power relations themselves, and we should keep this distinction in mind), and thereby constituted an “outside” to it. As the world is fully mapped (real subsumption, the field of immanence) the spaces of exit disappear, and their function is transferred into a temporal domain. So you have these temporary emergences of something like exit that can be lived, but rest assured that they will always be reterritorialized by mafia capitalism. Every time I try to get out, in other words, they pull me back in. (Indeed, the disappearance of the mafia itself—to digress significantly but not fully—can be read as a symptom of real subsumption, where the mafia codes constituted a residual and unacceptable pre-capitalist social formation.)

I’ve already gone too long on this, but here’s the point. The practical problem of exit in an immanent field results in a domination of the field (theoretically) by loyalty and voice. Put another way, all activities come to appear as loyalty or voice, reproduction or protest. There is no margin for exit. And while liberals, leftists, progressives, and—for that matter—thinking people of all stripes heap well-deserved disdain on Bush’s “If you’re not with us, you’re against us” rhetoric, there is a way in which Bush is quite right: he’s boiled down into a sound bite the analytical foundation of real subsumption, however contemporary social theory tends to complicate loyalty and voice by mixing their proportions. Indeed, the situation could appear even worse, since from a perspective of capitalism (and this administration’s political power!) the slogan actually works more aggressively as “Even (and especially) if you’re against us, you’re with us.” The consequence for theory is that every social emergence is read back against its “relationship” to political power. Where file sharing emerges as a practice, it is immediately related back to authorship and the copyright regime. Where graffiti emerges as a practice, it is immediately read back against ownership and public space. Indeed, to do otherwise now takes on the appearance of either quixotic irrelevance, or romanticized striving after an in-itself divorced from social context, as if it is a condition of real subsumption that everything be “contextualized,” where contextualization is most often merely a pretext for sealing off the exit door. Every time I try to get out, they contextualize me back in.

I should say, of course, that there is nothing wrong with contextualizing. I’ve done quite a bit of it here, as the contradiction-mongers may point out. And, yes, far too many populations experience something like “real” exit against their will. You want “exit,” people will say, you can go down to the favelas surrounding Rio, or any city of the global South, and plenty of the North besides, and you can find all the exit you’ll ever want, but you may not find the “pirate utopia” you’re seeking. These are fair objections, though the second confuses a limited access to resources with exclusion from an immanent order, as if that order weren’t precisely about actualizing the such limitations – as if the people of the favelas and shanty-towns weren’t the most stitched into the domain of capitalism precisely in their seeming exclusion from the circuits of capital. Fair objections, however.

While I will not answer them directly, I hope it’s obvious by now that I’m not saying “exit” is necessarily good. I’m not seeking a pirate utopia (or atopia, which is perhaps the more accurate term given the condition of immanence). Rather, I think we need to experiment with analyzing exit, or even to invent ways of thinking in terms of exit. The TAZ is just such an attempt, though it remains wedded (perhaps inevitablely) to a soft version of voice. Like any experiment or invention, these ways may be failures, or even dangerous, or even – if we’re lucky – useless (isn’t the useless a kind of exit all its own these days?), but that’s the task I’ve set myself to. In Cintron (Part 2), we see an interesting mixture of voice and loyalty—far more interesting than most analyses. But the conceptual apparatus absolutely rejects exit, for reasons I’ll explain. Moreover, I will not claim (in Part 3) that graffiti is solely an “exit.” Its proportions of loyalty (signature), exit (event), and voice (context) are obviously very complicated, and I want to work those out in some detail. But I want to insist that we at least pretend to think graffiti as exit, that we act as if exit could be a way of thinking immanence. At this point, however, the 45 minutes I allotted for this post is finis, so I will have to exit, stage left. To other work, of course…

Saturday Addendum: she has quite correctly accused me of a bait and switch, luring in unsuspecting readers with promises of graffiti analysis, only to revert back to pompous theorizing. Worse, she’s suggested that I am attempting to emulate a Particularly Famous Blogger, something I wouldn’t want to do (because I could not do). To remedy this disgraceful situation, I am providing some new pics here that will at least allow me to pretend that I haven’t strayed too far from the goals set out for the series.

Our friend VEGAN at it again, corner of Kingsbury and North

BEGOE rooftop, Red/Brown line southbound side, between Fullerton and Belmont

TMC Rooftop, Red/Brown line between Fullerton and Belmont (new stuff)

PANDA ROK, off Red/Brown line at Belmont. Bang it out, kid.

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