Physical Graffiti

I really like Bill Benzon's new post on graffiti and I really like that he clicked about OOO somehow, through his exploration of it. OOO is indeed a clicky kind of a thing. It's counterintuitive yet compelling once you pass through the strange mirror. Graham Harman describes his first experience of figuring it out as quite odd: he had to puzzle over it for several hours while he accepted it.

For me it's like looking at a magic eye picture. I used this analogy in the Q&A at De Paul, in some remarks on object and relations. You think that the image that suddenly resolves in the magic eye picture is an emergent property of the little squiggles (relations, emerging as objects). Then you realize that the object was distributed, encoded if you like, throughout those squiggles: it was there all along, staring you in the face as Bill says (objects prior to relations). I'm very bad at those magic eye pictures in any case, no doubt due to some latent psychopathology.

So I like it that Bill's post mentions what your eyes do when you see an object. And I like it that the vision is somehow freshly attuned, in his study of graffiti, to things that are in front of where you think they should be—which is how they hide.

If you've ever shoplifted (advice for thieves coming up, just one of my many talents), you know that the safest way to do it is right in front of the camera. No one can believe what they see before their eyes.

And after five hundred years of looking for essences elsewhere or denying their existence altogether, we're all pretty much in the position of looking for the thing anywhere but under our nose.

Bill picks up on my remarks on cities, since the Temple talk was at a conference about urban ecology. I was saying that London keeps on unfolding new secret streets and strange routes that I never knew, as if London as a hyperobject contains more than any entity could possibly trace.

Happily as I drove to the talk I saw bridges covered in very beautiful graffiti, which as Bill says is still an underappreciated and unexplored form. Sort of city architectural jazz, no?

But Bill makes an even bigger point, by implication. Causality itself is a kind of graffiti. I know that sounds incredible but what we have in reality are translations of objects, in which one object becomes inscribed by another one. I go into this in some detail in the talk.




So why is human graffiti compelling? Not because it marks, defaces, beautifies a surface, like eye candy. But because it contains a sort of echo of the fuel of causation itself. Every event is a tag.

Maybe that's why I like this:

And this:



And this (just look at how the writing and the tendrils interact, see my previous on tropology and plants and algorithms):



Oh what the heck, here's another one: