Graffiti: The Artform of the Proletariat?

This is the alleyway that takes you from St Michaels Lane to North Lane in Headingley, Leeds. It is a cut-through at the back of the cricket/rugby grounds. As well as there being a family of foxes nearby, who seem to be around day and night, the walls are full of graffiti throughout most of the length of the path. These are the boldest and most colourful of the selection there:

This is one of the more subtle ones.

Here's an extract from a graffiti blog called Bombing Science. The article is entitled 'Graffiti Theory: Graffiti and Marxism':

Illegal. Feared. Rejected by societal norms and described like cancers to communities, a destructive virus that consumes and devours decent proper values until suddenly there’s a crack house next door OR perhaps just another victim of Marx’s social alienation. Let’s be straight, America really has no problem with graffiti—as long as they can make a buck off it. The style has been mimicked and milked in almost every market, from designer t-shirts to XBOX games and countless hip-hop album covers. Yet despite all this corporate love, the act of getting up, putting the paint on the walls is still punishable by jail time and large amounts of debt.

Graffiti is the art form of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie can’t sell off the walls of their factories so whatever the workers write on them is finally there’s to keep. It’s an art that cannot be exploited by those who own the means of production, because graffiti exploits them first. The proletariat artist is using the property of the bourgeoisie as a canvas—essentially redistributing the use of property to the people. In that sense graffiti writing becomes the last truly free artistic vehicle; it cannot be taxed and doesn’t have to be taught. Anyone can participate, regardless of class, race, religious preference or sexual orientation. Graffiti doesn’t even require consumption of any materials if the artist doesn’t wish to purchase them. According to old school ethics, paint should be stolen from supply stores as an act of liberation from bourgeoisie’s financial death-traps—but really, all you need is a rock and a hard surface to scratch on to make your mark.

Click here for a recent Yorkshire Evening Post article on Synical, a local 'graffiti vandal', as the police have described him: 'Leeds graffiti vandal's war on blank look'

In people all over the world...we find ourselves.

I picked up this lovely little second-hand pamphlet online called The Revolutionary Pleasure of Thinking for Yourself while looking for Situationist journals. It was printed in 2003 in the US and the introduction states that the essay therein was originally published in The Spectacle in 1975.

There is one paragraph that gives an excellent example for helping explain Marxist abstraction, alienation or even the Debordian spectacle. Here it is:

Suppose that you want a cup of coffee from the vending machine at work. First, there is the cup of coffee itself: that involves the workers on the coffee plantation, the ones on the sugar plantation and in the refineries, the ones in the paper mill, and so on. Then you have the workers who made the different parts of the vending machine and the ones who assembled it. Then the ones who extracted the iron ore and bauxite, smelted the steel, and work for the electricity utility which supplies power to the machine. Then all the workers who transported the coffee, cups and machine. Then the clerks, typists, and communication workers who coordinated the production of all things necessary for the others ones to survive. That gives you a direct material relationship to several million people, in fact, to the immense majority of the world's population. They produce your life, and you help produce theirs. In this light, all artificial group identities and special group interests fade into insignificance. Imagine the potential enrichment of your life that at present is locked up in the frustrated creativity of these millions of workers, held back by obsolete and exhausting methods of production, strangled by lack of control over their own productivity, warped by the insane rationale of capital-accumulation which pits one against all and makes life a mad scramble for economic survival. Here we begin to discover a real social identity - in people all over the world who are fighting to win control over their own lives, we find ourselves.

Links:
AK Press and Distribution

Louis Althusser, Ideology and the Practices of the Institution

In 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation)' (1969) Louis Althusser explains how he has developed his term 'ideology' from that of Karl Marx. He explains, that for Marx, ideology was a set of “ideas and representations which dominate the mind of a man or a social group.” (2006: 107). Althusser then goes on to distinguish the differences between a theory of ideologies and a theory of ideology: a theory of ideologies is grounded in history due to the class positions represented in the social formations taking place around it; whereas a theory of ideology is not oriented in history, because there is no position outside of ideology that can enable history to reflect ideology's position (ibid.).

Althusser explains that in Marx and Engel's The German Ideology the term 'ideology' is reworked, and he describes it as no longer being a Marxist one (ibid.). In this version ideology is completely unreal and can be compared more to a dream: “All its reality is external to it.” (Althusser 2006: 108). Althusser states that it is because of this that ideology's history is outside of it, leaving the individual with only their own concrete bearing (ibid.). It is this that distinguishes Althusser's project – the development of a theory of ideology – from a theory of ideologies in general, and he puts a convincing argument forward to explain how he works on the term 'ideology' in The German Ideology to form his own version in respect to his thesis. He demonstrates that if ideology is a dream, this means it must be a “negative determination”; also if ideology has no history that pertains to it (all it has is a perverted version of history) then this too is a negative thesis as “it has no history of its own.” (ibid). Althusser's main problem with this negative thesis in relation to The German Ideology appears to be with his observation of the work in general being a “positivist and historicist” one. To clarify his position, to propel his own thesis forward, and to demonstrate the difference between a theory of ideologies and one of ideology, Althusser states:

[…] I think it is possible to hold that ideologies have a history of their own (although it is determined in the last instance by the class struggle); and on the other, I think it is possible to hold that ideology in general has no history, not in a negative sense (its history is external to it), but in an absolutely positive sense. (ibid.).

This would be a 'positive' thesis for Althusser because he believes that there is a structure in which ideology rests that transcends history: the form that ideology takes, and how it operates, has been the same throughout time (2006: 108-109).

Before discussing how Althusser's model of ideology fits into my discussion of the educational institution, and in particular the university campus, I would like to introduce Althusser's two theses that make up his essay. The first, which shows a radical displacement of Marx's original model; and the second which materially situates ideology.

“Thesis I: Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.” (Althusser 2006: 109). Whereas for Marx ideology is an illusion because it it misrepresents 'reality' to the proletariat, for Althusser it is the actual relationship between the individual and 'reality' that is misrepresented. Althusser concedes that this first thesis is a negative one in its representation of the object which is distorted (ibid.). He also believes that if ideology takes the form that he proposes, then this dispenses both with the idea that the authors of ideologies are powerful groups of people who deliberately mislead the less powerful 'other'; also the concept of alienation that was so important to Marx also, therefore, becomes irrelevant (2006: 112).

“Thesis II: Ideology has a material existence.” (Althusser 2006: 112). This material existence exists in the practices which are oriented in the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) - the ISAs being the following institutions: religious, educational, political, cultural, legal, along with the family and communications (Althusser 2006: 96). Because for Althusser this misrepresented relationship which is ideology, is “endowed with a material existence.” (2006: 113), these practices are “the realization of an ideology” and they “always exist in an apparatus” (Althusser 2006: 112). Althusser offers the church as an example of an institution that provides an apparatus for the individual to partake in a practice and thus realise its ideology. This is what he says about how this process works:

The individual in question behaves in such and such a way, adopts such and such a practical attitude, and, what is more, participates in certain regular practices which are those of the ideological apparatus on which 'depend' the ideas which he has in all consciousness freely chosen as a subject.
(2006: 113).

Althusser sees the actions that are carried out in relation to, for example, belief, duty and justice, correspond to attitudes in the subject that mean that they render themselves to a particular worldview (ibid.). And, for Althusser, both the attitude of the individual, and the practices in which they are involved, are material (ibid.); as he confirms, they are “actions inserted into practices.” (2006: 114).

A particularly interesting point Althusser makes in relation to how these practices operate on ideology is how by actually participating in them belief is produced (ibid.). It does not matter whether you believe or not, because the actions you carry out presuppose a belief that exists within that apparatus. Hence, the effects of the practice retroactively produces its cause through subjecting the individual. Therefore, the individual as subject is both the cause and effect. These actions are the effects of the ideological apparatus of which the individual is subjected, but they are also what produce him as the subject, as the cause of the effects. This is an integral part of Althusser's theory on structural causality. Why this is important for the institution (useful in terms of the promulgation of its ideology), is that those engaging in it, perhaps even at first sceptically, will eventually become subjected to it. This, I believe, is how the administration of the educational institution works, specifically in relation to 'excellence'.

Bibliography
Althusser, Louis. 2006. 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation)', Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. by Ben Brewster (Delhi: Aakar Books) pp. 85-126.