How do Graffiti culture and municipal attempts to administrate it, fit within the critique of strategies/tactics offered by Michael de Certeau?
In his book, The Practice of Everyday Life, Michael de Certeau argues authorities employ ‘strategies’ to regulate public urban environments and institute relations for official ends, whilst subjugated individuals employ ‘tactics’ to challenge such strategies. Graffiti culture and municipal attempts to administrate it exemplify the paradoxical relationship between institutional power and individuals within public space, and their ceaseless conflict over the right to define public space. While strategies seek to define the limits of urban space, tactics create a schism which allows for the regeneration of an open public space, resulting in a new collective discourse of the urban environment. The city is characterised by the everyday renegotiation of this relationship between institutions of power and the individual, the transgressive acts of individuals increasingly permitting the re-emergence of the elements which the urbanistic project seek to exclude.
Certeau asserts the ‘urban city’ is an amalgamation of the strategies employed by institutions and authorities in an attempt to regulate the actions and behaviours of individuals within this space.[1] However, Certeau also defines the everyday actions of individuals who manipulate and transgress these rules as tactics which subvert the omniscient power of authority over public space.[2] For Certeau, the city is constructed by the interplay of these two forces and their opposition to each other in defining the limits of space. The city is embedded with meanings of space through the strategies which regulate how the environment is occupied and through the ‘stories’ created by the transgressive acts of individuals against such authority.[3] Strategies are viewed by Certeau as symptomatic of a ‘functionalist totalitarianism’ which ‘saturate places with signification and indeed so reduces them to this signification’.[4] The city becomes a ‘suspended symbolic order’ defined by the boundaries imposed by strategies enforced by institutional power.[5] However, tactics allow for this stagnated environment to be ‘punctured’ by ‘leaks of meaning’ which produce anti-texts and discourses which create new meaning and realise new possibilities for existence within the urban environment.[6] Tactics transform the city from a ‘place’ to a ‘space’, the interplay of strategies and tactics creating a space which is intersected by the antitheses of graffiti and authority vying to control the hegemonic discourse of public space.[7]
Graffiti culture and attempts made by municipalities to administrate it, epitomise the paradoxical relationship between tactics and strategies and their struggle to define public space. Graffiti has from its inception been fundamentally driven by the friction between the individual and authority, and is inherently confrontational as writers assert their resistance against the influence of institutionalised power.[8] Graffiti is a means of expressing oneself, reclaiming space and declaring “I’m here”.[9] Graffiti has become an emotionally charged public order issue, being tied with morality and injustice.[10] The infringement upon public space is met with aggressive criminalisation by local and state authorities.[11] Authorities have framed graffiti as an abuse on ‘private property rights’ and as ‘defacing’ the city, and have hence declared ‘war’ on the culture.[12] Graffiti has become the target of such a war as its tactics bring into dialogue discourses that challenge the notions of power and legitimacy in public spheres.[13] Author Kurt Iveson asserts a war to ‘maintain social order’, such as the war on graffiti is framed, ‘has to be won again every day’ making strategies employed by authorities indistinguishable from war.[14] Authorities and advertisers claim “ownership” over public spaces and employ strategies to control the use of such spaces. However, tactics are employed in resistance to these strategies, which are reciprocated with further strategies, creating a paradoxical continuum. The continuous conflict is fundamentally over controlling the hegemonic discourse of public space, and has created an urban landscape which is untenable and uninhabitable as strategies increasingly exclude and suppress individual expression.
Despite the constant conflict between strategies and tactics, Certeau asserts that while strategies create a city void of meaning, tactics have the power to create a new discourse of the urban environment that ‘liberates from enclosure and destroys autonomy’, hence opening the public space to all individuals.[15] Certeau contends ‘limits are drawn at the points at which the progressive appropriations (strategies)… and the successive displacements (tactics)… meet’.[16] In extending Certeau’s theory, graffiti can be viewed as an attempt to extend the frontiers of public space, whilst municipal authority tries to confine and restrict them. The war between authority and transgression, simultaneously fractures and unifies the urban environment. While institutions attempt to control how space is used in the city, the divergence between authority and graffiti artists allows for artists to palpably rebel against such control. The visual nature of graffiti allows this transgression to be understood by all those who witness it, and thus prompts others to question who controls public space and its boundaries and discourses.[17] Social science professor Cameron McAuliffe argues graffiti is an increasingly important as it ‘revitalises’ the city and sense of community and prompts ‘civic engagement and political inclusion’ for those who are otherwise excluded by local and state strategies.[18] Cities such as Melbourne have embraced the creative community that graffiti creates through its implementation of ‘zones of tolerance’ in many laneways.[19] This highlights the importance of the tactics of graffiti in creating a new urban discourse of inclusion and transgression and the re-opening of the urban space to all individuals.
Michael de Certeau’s theory of strategies and tactics highlights the importance of the conflict between graffiti artists’ transgression and the regulating power of authorities over public spaces. Municipal attempts to administrate graffiti illustrate how strategies are used to control how and by whom public spaces are used, whilst tactics are used to make public space freely accessible. Further, his critique can be used to understand the transformative nature of graffiti in creating new and open discourses of the city.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Certeau, Michael de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1980.
Ferrell, Jeff. “Urban Graffiti: Crime, Control and Resistance.” Youth and Society 27 (1995): 33-42.
Iveson, Kurt. “The Wars on Graffiti and the New Military Urbanism.” Routledge 14, 1-2 (2010): 115-134.
McAuliffe, Cameron. “Graffiti or Street Art? Negotiating the Moral Geographies of the Creative City.” Journal of Urban Affairs 34, 2 (2012): 189-206.
McCormick, Carlo. “Introduction.” In Trespass: A History of Uncommissioned Urban Art, edited by Ethel Seno, 12-17. Cologne: Taschen, 2010.
Oliver, Jeff and Neal, Tim. Wild Signs: An Introduction. Oxford: Archaeopress, 2010.
Waclaweck,
Anna. Graffiti and Street Art: Reclaiming
the Streets. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2011.
[1] Michael de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1980), 106.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid., 93.
[4] Ibid., 106.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid., 107.
[7] Ibid., 117.
[8] Jeff Ferrell, “Urban Graffiti: Crime Control and Resistance,” Youth and Society 27 (1995): 33.; Waclaweck, Graffiti and Street Art, 185.
[9] Ferrell, “Urban Graffiti,” 36.; Waclaweck, Graffiti and Street Art, 185.
[10] Cameron McAuliffe, “Graffiti or Street Art? Negotiating the Moral Geographies of the Creative City,” Journal of Urban Affairs 34, 2 (2012): 189.
[11] Ferrell, “Urban Graffiti,” 35.
[12] McAuliffe, “Graffiti or Street Art?” 189-91.
[13] Jeff Oliver and Tim Neal, Wild Signs: An Introduction (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2010): 2.; Waclaweck, “Graffiti and Street Art,” 73.
[14] Kurt Iveson, “The Wars on Graffiti and the New Military Urbanism,” Routledge 14, (2010): 118.
[15] Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 128.
[16] Ibid., 126.
[17] Carlo McCormick, “Introduction,” in Trespass, ed. Ethel Seno (Cologne: Taschen, 2010), 16.
[18] McAuliffe, “Graffiti or Street Art?” 192.
[19] Ibid., 197.
