Superheroes! Get your power, your mask, and cape snatched
Brooklyn take what you can’t take back
I know alotta cats hate that, all I can say, black
There’s a city fulla walls you can post complaints at
- Mos Def, “Speed Law”
At long last, the follow up to Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. I’ve had small twenty minute windows this week to devote to it, and I’ve been inspired by Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude, a remarkable book about, in part, writing – the dense surface of writing. I’m only about 150 pages in, but I absolutely love it. Lethem’s story takes place in what’s really about a ten-square block area of Brooklyn – our old haunts or a little to the east, so it’s painfully, nostalgically familiar, even down to the naming of Triangle Sports, a sporting good store that stood on our Brooklyn corner, flashing cryptic messages on a scrolling digital sign.
No lie: she and I had just seen David Lynch’s surreal and inscrutable Mullholland Drive at the Brooklyn Academy of Music theater (lovingly called BAM), so we were already confused and slightly disoriented; we pass Triangle Sports and its sign is flashing “How Many Texts? How Many Texts? How Many Texts?” Just as we’re marveling at this now surreal message that has somehow dragged the strange film out on to the street, at just that moment a guy rode past us on 5th Avenue on a goddamn unicycle. Welcome to Brooklyn, where art bleeds on to the sidewalk. Where you never really leave the theater. And Lethem gets this right, with passages that have me just soaring as I read on the El, this many miles away, Chicago, North Side and definitely not Brooklyn.
Definitely not Brooklyn. Lethem has an interesting take on the name of this ten block zone, once Gowanus, but now Boerem Hill or something like it, now a virtual paradise for corporate lawyers escaping Manhattan. Can’t quite get into the Heights, so they go to Boerem Hill. This name, in the novel, comes from an old woman who sought to gentrify the place in the early 70’s, but failed, dooming the protagonist, one Dylan Ebdus, to a childhood of getting yoked by black kids, a dense fear of “play that funky music white boy.” It’s gentrified now, though. Boerem Hill. Not Gowanus. Where we lived was similar, 5th between Park and Prospect. You’d tell people that you live in Park Slope and they’d just smile, like, “Is that what the real estate agent told you?” When we lived in San Francisco, we were told that we lived in “Lower Nob Hill,” a monumental joke: Post between Hyde and Larkin was pure Tenderloin. We responded that we lived in “Tenderloin Heights.” But there, at least, a real border existed that allowed the comedy of it, a street that pushed to one side Nob Hill and its affluent altitude, and to the other the Tenderloin, another kind of high, with its pushers, addicts, and Vietnamese restaurants all in a row. In Brooklyn, we lived in no neighborhood: not Park Slope, not really, not Fort Greene, not Prospect Heights on our side of Flatbush, and not Boerem Hill on our side of the Wyckoff Gardens housing project, no, not Gowanus. The creative residents called it Slope of the Slope, as if the long trailing hill leading down from Fredrick Law Olmstead’s other New York park could continue in degrees indefinitely: Slope of the Slope of the Slope, all the way to Red Hook. But not really. Too far north for even the yearning Slope of the Slope: no neighborhood, no place. Atopia. But definitely Brooklyn.
And little Dylan Ebdus is a tagger, a writer. Or Dylan wants to be a writer. He hasn’t caught one tag yet, his only attempt – a pathetic under-the-slide tag in a filthy park – foiled by a superhero in a pee-stained cape, a homeless black man who flies (maybe) off a third story roof, survives, catches Dylan in the act, and hits him up (as does everyone else) for his fifty cent mugging money, and even his hidden dollar. Lethem gets graffiti right, too. Those first, faltering attempts. The way you start to see those ups, the pilgrimages to the holy sites, like where LEE hit the Brooklyn Bridge. And the problem of meaning:
“That’s my tag,” said Mingus when he caught Dylan studying the cloud of visual noise. “Here.” He tore out a page and, holding his pen with fingers close to the point, tongue curling against his cheek in concentration, wrote DOSE in angled block letters. Then he drew it again in a clumsy balloon font, the D and O barely distinguishable, the E swollen so its three digits overlapped – faint mimicry, it seemed to Dylan, of a Marvel Comics sound effect panel.
“What’s it mean?”
“It’s my tag, Dose. It’s what I write.”
It was a new given. Anyone might have a tag… (72)
Mingus (and yes, it’s Dylan and Mingus, folk and jazz), who actually does bomb, says it all in the non-reply. What’s it mean? It’s my tag. Lethem is fascinated by just this question, and, perhaps more importantly, just this response. Later:
They halted two-thirds across. On the vast tower planted at Manhattan’s mouth were two lavish word-paintings, red and white and green and yellow sprayed fantastically high on the rough stone, edges bled in geological texture. The first read MONO, the second LEE, syllables drained of meaning like Mingus’s DOSE.
Yes, right. Syllables drained of meaning. But they can be captured. We see this capture at work in Ralph Cintron’s “Gangs and Their Walls,” a chapter from his sociological/rhetorical study of Chicago’s black and Latino gangs, Angel’s Town: Chero Ways, Gang Life, and the Rhetorics of the Everyday. Cintron’s argument is really fascinating, and I want to address it at some length, but I first must beg a rather tortured proviso.
“Gangs and Their Walls,” or, Who’s Appropriating Whom?
The graffiti that I’ve been discussing so far has been tag graffiti, which is much different from the gang graffiti that Cintron analyzes. This is going to get contorted, but there’s no way around it. Gang graffiti can contain tags, but is mostly focused on crew and territory. Even in Cintron’s account, the “tags” are usually gang names, like the Latin Kings or the Black Gangster Disciples. The same can be said about the LA gangs: these are much more tightly knit social groups than your average graffiti crew; they encompass every aspect of their members’ lives, and the graffiti, as a result, tends to be less “individualistic.” Yes, but. Tag graffiti is also about gangs to the extent that most writers are also down with various crews, and these crews get into wars, and you “hook up” your crew (meaning that you put your crew initials next to your tag). But it’s not really the same thing, even if the gangs very closely resemble some of the kinds of gangs Cintron analyzes.
Maybe it’s a difference in accent. Take an old school Queens guy, SAINT, who was the “Prez” of The Master Race (TMR), a Bayside gang (named after the Dead Kennedy’s song “California Uber Alles,” and not a Nazi gang as some supposed from the name). TMR was a real gang, but not in the way of the Latin Kings or the Crips. Just as one example, graffiti crews almost never have “colors” or gang signs, and – while some members are engaged in (ahem) business practices like drug-dealing, the business is not the object of the entire crew. Bombing is. Getting up. When SAINT wrote graffiti, you’d see big SAINT TMR tags, but the accent was on the SAINT, not on the TMR, even though the TMR was important. You’d still have beef with other gangs (TMR had a long-running beef with the Fresh Meadows crew KAC), but in tag graffiti, the aesthetics (styles) and proliferation (ups) is more important than marking territory for or representing a gang entity. Cintron’s graffiti isn’t about proliferation in the same way, focusing less on the fame and daring of the writer and more on the establishment of a group territoriality. And, quite frankly, the aesthetics of Cintron’s examples are laughable. Real toy shit. No tag graffiti writer would be caught dead turning out those silly “Old English” letters in the early 90’s, much less praising their quality. But this goes to the point. Tag graffiti can’t be read in the same way as gang graffiti because there really is a differen social structure at work. That’s the proviso, now on to Cintron’s arguments.
Cintron’s chapter is broken into two parts. The first (much weaker) section sets out the “lexicon, syntax, and morphemes” of gang graffiti, really a structuralist analysis of graffiti elements as language elements, and plagued with all the usual problems of structural linguistics, with some bizarre metaphor analysis thrown in as a bridge to the real discussion. The second part, while dubiously linked to the first, ends up being much more interesting; here Cintron tries to leverage this newly discovered “meaning” of gang graffiti (declarations of metaphorical ownership and the like) to make some larger claims about graffiti writers’ (and gangs’) relationships to property and the public sphere. His most important insight is that writers appropriate and transform common tropes from mainstream culture. I’ll just go over these parts briefly, then relate them back to my claims about exit from the Exit, Voice, and Loyalty post.
Cintron is at pains to demonstrate what I take to be an interesting point, which I will quote at length here because I think this passage captures his longish argument fairly well:
In the public sphere, street gangs and particularly “hard-core” gang members may be viewed as a kind of antisociety, as barbarous and vermin-like, so completely outside the fold of the human community that they deserve to be removed. Indeed, as I will show, street gangs for very understandable reasons sometimes played with this very rhetoric, creating from it hyperbolized images in which the mainstream could witness its deepest fears. In gobbling up these images, the mainstream felt it had evidence that proved the legitimacy of its views. [...] …even as a street gang adopted its trangressive pose, the gang was structured with numerous appropriations from the mainstream. In other words, appropriations of mainstream material, so visible during a gang members display of his or her colors, might be understood as a synecdoche of an entire system of appropriations through which street gangs constructed themselves. Therefore, to understand the display of colors was to understand that the mainstream’s cultural material was the very fund that a street gang tapped in order to make its meanings. The mainstream may have circulated a fund of cash and iconography, but the street gang performed a symbolic conquering of the mainstream when mainstream meanings gave way to gang meanings. For the most part, the mainstream could not interpret gang meanings, and thus a secret, esoteric, subterranean world was made. (Cintron 167)
This deceptively dense passage is really the key to Cintron’s argument and methodology. The first part of his chapter is dedicated to a translation of these appropriated mainstream materials, a translation that passes by way of the “language” of graffiti. Translation is, of course, a fraught and suspect operation, relying on some agreed upon “common” space through which to effect the passage. For Cintron, this common space is the element of language: syntax (which is the “grammar” of graffiti), lexicon (graffiti’s semantic resources), and even down to the morpheme (those elements of a language that contain semantic content but are not necessarily words, like the way “dis,” when attached to a word, can indicate negation: regard, dis-regard). If the mainstream (which is to say, Cintron’s readers) cannot interpret graffiti’s meaning, Cintron will make damn sure that they can, even down to letter-stem: “This flourish on the letter ‘T’ echoed , of course, the upside down pitchforks in the ‘main’ text [How many texts? How many texts? How many texts?] and elsewhere by which the author boldly announced himself or herself as disrespecting all Disciples” (172). It goes on like this for pages and pages, a “glossary” of the “language of graffiti” that resembles those strange hip hop glossaries in which we – yes, “we” – learn to interpret Ice Cube’s statement that “Cuz one-time’s so hot/ got me a stash spot in my hooptie for the glock.” Because the police, you see, are currently very diligent in their duties, Mr. Cube has devised an ingenious hiding spot for his handgun right there in his car! My Lord!
A friend once said that much of the “multicultural” work that goes on in composition is really about installing something like “double-consciousness” in white suburban kids. Maybe that’s a good thing, but what are the non-white kids in the class – who already swim in double-consciousness – supposed to do during this installation process? I found myself asking the same question of Cintron. The translation exercise is clearly for those who don’t understand the “language.”
If the point is that graffiti has a set of codes by which it operates, well, yes. All machines have parts. But the real point (and for obvious political reasons) is to make that “secret, esoteric, subterranean” world available to the mainstream, to expose it, and thereby to erase its exit value: “See! They’re not ‘outside the fold,’ not barbarous, not vermin-like!” Ah, they’re just like us. So Cintron’s second move is to catalog, as a series of topoi, the way “antisociety” is not that at all. “A ’shadow’ system,” Cintron insists, “depends on themes and models provided by and circulating through the system world” (176). So, gangs appropriate and transform topoi from the “system world” (which is to say, the mainstream) in order to accomplish practical ends in both these shadow systems and the mainstream system world itself. They appropriate topoi of nationhood, topoi of royalty. They appropriate topoi of madness/disorder and its “paired” twin rationality/order.*
And with this move, the dialectic is completed, negation of the negation, society and antisociety in an elegant pas de deux. At best, the appropriation of mainstream symbols is a voice operation, through which writers (really, gangs) construct their own identities, often in opposition to the existing social system. But perhaps more interestingly, it seems even closer to loyalty, as the writers so lovingly embrace the fund of mainstream symbols. Because they transform them, we have voice; indeed, Cintron is most concerned about the capacity of the public sphere to “not recognize the maverick or give him/her voice because in doing so maverickness itself will be encouraged across the social body until all icons of stability collapse” (195). However, because they appropriate from the mainstream, we have a species of loyalty, and it is only through this loyalty that the strangeness of that voice can begin to emerge from its secrecy in the interest of social justice. For ever and ever. Amen. But…
“What’s it mean?”
“It’s my tag, Dose. It’s what I write.”
There’s a kind of dumb obstinacy in Mingus’ response, really a non-response, or a response to another question not yet stated. Or perhaps even non-recognition of the question itself, the form of the question. Lethem recognizes, I think, that there’s something secret in this non-response, something either too infinitesimally small or too excessive, something that cannot be translated, even if it appropriates blocks of “meaning” from a mainstream system world. In the end, it’s Cintron’s focus on specifically gang graffiti that makes even the faint glimmer of the non-response thoroughly invisible, for gangs do sometimes mirror, in a plainly dialectical mode, mainstream social systems, and are thus themselves subject (yes, subject) to appropriation a la Cintron. System and shadow system in an inescapable relationship beneath the sun of meaning. But the infinitesimally small or the massively excessive, the non-response to the question of meaning?
“It’s my tag. It’s what I write.”
There’s exit there. Dis-regard for the public sphere. Something else.
About which more in the next installment…
* On the question of madness/disorder and reason/order, Cintron brings up Foucault, who he both dutifully appropriates and subjects to the usual senseless drubbing – a seemingly necessary rhetorical move that continues to mystify me. Specifically, Cintron notes that “…what Foucault little appreciates is the possibility that the evolution of psychiatry also represents the good intentions of curing a special form of human pain” (183). This is utter nonsense, if the usual liberal reading of Foucault. Indeed, one might understand Foucault’s entire corpus as an investigation of just those good intentions. This misreading, however, can be turned back on Cintron’s argument, which should be subject to an investigation of his own “good intentions” just as much as Foucault tried to understand the “good intentions” of the prison reformers, or at least the forces that produced and resulted from them. Social justice as the suspect category in all this, then, the category that requires the absolute destruction of exit in all its forms, both conceptually and in practice. Visibility, as Foucault said, and certainly voice as well, is a trap…
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