Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-mzp66 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-14T04:26:01.773Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Official Graffiti of the Everyday

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Joe Hermer  and
Alan Hunt
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

This article focuses attention on “official graffiti” or regulatory signs typified by highway signs and the most invasive and emblematic piece of official graffiti, the prohibition circle with its diagonal red slash used in the iconic representation No Smoking. Establishing the range and pervasiveness of official graffiti in everyday life (as prohibitions, warnings, advisories, instructions, etc.), the authors approach these visual manifestations from the standpoint of the sociology of governance and analyze them as important instances of government at a distance. They explore the varieties and forms of such regulation and trace their expansion from public space to quasi-public space and to the private realm. Locating the texts and icons of official graffiti within implied or express discursive frameworks, the authors point to the construction of objects and subjects of regulation and to regulatory agents as “absent experts” and address the key role of the construction of danger and the link to insurance principles in a “risk society.” They also examine resistance through actions of defacement and avoidance that result in the complex order and disorder of surfaces and spaces. Official graffiti manifests a distinctive form of hegemony that is exercised through the small, daily acts of everyday governance.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 30 , Issue 3 , 1996 , pp. 455 - 480
Copyright
Copyright © 1996 by The Law and Society Association

Footnotes

Thanks for valuable discussion and suggestions to Bruce Curtis and Derek Smith and also to this journal's anonymous reviewers, whose suggestions were most stimulating.

References

Althusser, Louis (1971) “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation),” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. London: New Left Books.Google Scholar
Beck, Ulrich (1992) Risk Society: Toiuards a Neiv Modernity. London: Sage Publications.Google Scholar
Burchell, Graham, Gordon, Colin, & Miller, Peter, eds. (1991) The Foucault Effect-Studies in Governmentality. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester-Wheatsheaf.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dean, Mitchell (1991) The Constitution of Poverty: Toward a Genealogy of Liberal Governance. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Donzelot, Jacques (1991) “The Mobilization of Society,” in Burchell et al. 1991.Google Scholar
Ewald, Francois (1991) “Insurance and Risk,” in Burchell et al. 1991.Google Scholar
Ferrell, J. (1993) Crimes of Style: Urban Graffiti and the Politics of Criminality. New York: Garland Publishing.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon Books.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel (1991) “Governmentality” [1979], in Burchell et al. 1991.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving (1963) Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. New York: Simon & Schuster.Google Scholar
Gordon, Colin (1991) “Governmental Rationality: An Introduction,” in Burchell et al. 1991.Google Scholar
Gramsci, Antonio (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks. London: Lawrence & Wishart.Google Scholar
Habermas, Jürgen (1987) The Theory of Communicative Action: vol. 2, Lifeworld and System. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Harman, Lesley D. (1987) The Modern Stranger: On Language and Membership. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Hart, H. L. A. (1961) The Concept of Law. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Hobsbawm, Eric (1994) Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991. London: Joseph.Google Scholar
Hunt, Alan (1993) Explorations in Law and Society. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Hunt, Alan (1996) Governance of the Consuming Passions: A History of Sumptuary Regulation. New York: St. Martins Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hunt, Alan, & Wickham, Gary (1994) Foucault and Law: Towards a New Sociology of Law as Governance. London: Pluto Press.Google Scholar
Lachmann, Richard (1988) “Graffiti as Career and Ideology,” 94 American J. of Sociology 229.Google Scholar
Latour, Bruno (1986) “Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands,” in Kuklick, H. & Long, E., eds., 6 Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present. Greenwood, CT: JAI Press.Google Scholar
Latour, Bruno (1987) Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.Google Scholar
Lofland, Lyn H. (1973) The World of Strangers: Order and Action in Urban Public Space. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Luna, C. Cajetan (1987) “Welcome to My Nightmare: The Graffiti of Homeless Youth,” 24 (6) Society 73.Google Scholar
Macaulay, Stewart (1986) “Private Government,” in Lipson, L. & Wheeler, S., eds., Law and the Social Sciences. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.Google Scholar
Markus, Thomas (1993) Buildings and Power. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Miller, Peter, & Rose, Nikolas (1990) “Governing Economic Life,” 19 (1) Economy & Society 1.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Timothy (1991) Colonising Egypt. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nwoye, Onuigbo G. (1993) “Social Issues on Walls: Graffiti in University Lavatories,” 4 Discourse & Society 419.Google Scholar
Oxford English Dictionary (1989) “Governance,” in The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Rodgers, H. R., & Bullock, C. S. (1976) Coercion to Compliance: The Role of Law in Effectuating Social Change. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.Google Scholar
Rose, Nikolas (1987) “Beyond the Public/Private Division: Law, Power and the Family,” in Fitzpatrick, P. & Hunt, A., eds., Critical Legal Studies. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
Rose, Nikolas (1989) Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Rose, Nikolas (1993) “Government, Authority and Expertise in Advanced Liberalism,” 22 Economy & Society 283.Google Scholar
Santos, Santos Boaventura da (1985) “On Modes of Production of Law and Social Power,” 13 International J. of the Sociology of Law 299.Google Scholar
Scott, Peter Dale (1993) Deep Politics and the Death of JFK. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.Google Scholar
Simmel, Georg (1950) “The Stranger,” in Wolff, K. H., ed., The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.Google Scholar
Simon, Jonathan (1987) “The Emergence of a Risk Society: Insurance, Law, and the State,” 95 Socialist Rev. 61.Google Scholar
Smith, Dorothy E. (1990) Texts, Facts and Femininity: Exploring the Relations of Ruling. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Steinmetz, George (1993) Regulating the Social: The Welfare State and Local Politics in Imperial Germany. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Touraine, Alain (1995) Critique of Modernity, trans. Macey, D.. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
White, Stephen K. (1990) Political Theory and Postmodernism. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Whitford, M.J. (1992) Getting Rid of Graffiti: A Practical Guide to Graffiti Removal and Anti-Graffiti Protection. London: E. & F. N. Spon.Google Scholar
Woodiwiss, Anthony (1990) Social Theory after Postmodernism: Rethinking Production, Law and Class. London: Pluto Press.Google Scholar