Student Blog Review
Two noteworthy blog contributions from our Anthropology of Media class are Jeff H.’s “Constructing Identities with Graffiti,” which examines the repeated defacement of the UBC engineers’ cairn, and Katrina S.’s “The Insurrection of Signs? Graffiti, Marc Emery and The Culture of the (Non-) Deviant,” which questions the subversive nature of a “Free Marc Emery” graffiti stencil. Both explore the implications of the graffiti from various critical perspectives and engage with larger issues of cultural identity and ideology.
Jeff traces the cairn’s historical legacy and contextualizes its significance through informal interviews with students representing different subject positions. He takes the position that the ritualized repainting of the cairn is ultimately a positive act that facilitates identity formation, “creating a systematically and almost mutually supported channeled output for the betterment of campus life.” I would take this a step further and suggest that the act of painting their colours or symbols on the cairn is an interpellative and performative act: the engineers’ identity is called into question, and they repeatedly assert and reinforce it, thereby calling students from other faculties into affiliation. Although it is tangential, I would be interested to extend the discussion to something I have always been curious about: why UBC engineering students are commonly referred to as “engineers,” but students in other faculties are called “pre-med” or “1Ls,” rather than “doctors” or “lawyers.” It might be useful to consider the cairn as representing an ideological state apparatus (ISA), a term Louis Althusser used to describe a society’s system for producing obedient citizens who practice and reproduce its dominant values (Althusser 1969). (I am of course being somewhat tongue-in-cheek here.) Althusser states that “all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects” (1504). The cairn, depending on what colour it has been painted, encourages us to align ourselves with a specific group (engineers or anthropology students), mutually recognize ourselves as interpellated subjects, and fulfill these identities in the real world. By defacing the cairn, we are not resisting our defined roles, but simply reproducing ideology. Jeff points out that there are no legal repercussions for those who deface the cairn; it is worthwhile to further consider the ideological implications.
In her blog, Katrina uses Baudrilliard’s theories of the empty signifier to examine whether stencil graffiti—the strategy employed by the “Free Marc Emery” tag campaign—is truly as subversive as its medium would imply. The tag leads one to a website that provides guidelines for effective protest, which Katrina argues ultimately encourages conformity. However, I would offer that by providing suggestions for activism along with an assessment of their relative costs, the group is not letting itself be “guided by economic considerations,” but rather providing multiple access points to mobilize people from different socioeconomic groups, promoting inclusivity and diversity. Katrina suggests that the stencil graffiti might be considered part of a “marketing campaign” that has received the “public’s general acceptance” and become domesticated because it is “almost aesthetically pleasing.” She argues that this dampens the message’s subversive possibilities. A possible counterbalance is the concept of “culture jamming,” a tactic used to disrupt the signification of mainstream media to disseminate counterideological messages, such as reworking advertising billboards to espouse messages of anti-capitalism, anti-consumerism, and anti-globalization. Culture jamming has been the subject of work by Mark Dery, Naomi Wolf, Noam Chomsky, and Kalle Lasn (founder of AdBusters magazine), among others. Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia and the carnivalesque is also applicable here. Katrina’s blog is a valuable contribution to the dialogue surrounding the role of the individual as a part of larger activist movements.
Both Jeff’s and Katrina’s blog postings present interesting, well-contextualized arguments that invite the reader to undertake further critical inquiry.
Works Cited
Althusser, Louis
2001 [1920] Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses [excerpts]. In The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Vincent B. Leitch, ed. Pp. 1483–1509. New York: W. W. Norton.
H., Jeff
2011 Constructing Identities with Graffiti. Jeff Hart’s Blog, Feb. 8. http://jeffalexanderhart.blogspot.com/2011/02/graffiti.html
S., Katrina
2011 The Insurrection of Signs? Graffiti, Marc Emery and The Culture of the (Non-) Deviant My-Diation Blogspot, Feb. 28. http://my-diation.blogspot.com/2011/02/insurrection-of-signs-graffiti-marc.html