What a Wall Wants, Or How Graffiti Thinks: Nomad Grammatology in the French Banlieue

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what a wallwants, or howgraffiti thinksnomadgrammatologyin the renchbanlieue

DaviD fieni


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David Fieni teaches at Sarah LawrenceCollege. His article, French Decadence,Arabic Awakenings, recently appearedin boundary 2; he has also published onJean Genet, Ernest Renan, and Algerianwomen writers. He is currently editing aspecial issue oExpressions maghrbineson the work o Abdelkbir Khatibi, and anissue oThe Journal o Postcolonial Writ-ing, entitled The Global Checkpoint.

DIAC RIT IC S Volume 40.2 (2012) 7293 2012 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

>> nomd Grmmtology

The now inamous series o inammatory remarks that Nicolas Sarkozy, as interior min-ister, repeatedly unleashed during the summer and all leading up to the banlieue ri-ots o 2005 sparked a swit and ferce public outcry. Commentators in both the Frenchand oreign press were quick to criticize Sarkozys vow to ush out [the thugs o LaCorneuve] with a Krcher [pressure washer] (il aut [les] nettoyer au Krcher).1 Itwas pointed out by Azouz Begag, as the newly appointed minister o equal opportuni-

ties, that such warlike language indiscriminately victimizes young people in the ban-lieue, while journalist Doug Ireland argued that Sarkozys comments conveyed hints oethnic cleansing by equating urban youth, largely o Maghrebi origin, with dirt thatneeded to be violently removed rom the otherwise smooth and clean civic spaces o theFrench Republic.2 The populist rage that Sarkozy articulated by using the term racaille(rabble, scum) received most o the attention, including an essay in Le Monde thatexplored the words etymology (intended as a lesson in the politics o language or theFrench interior minister).3

It is the Krcher reerence, however, that most interests me here. Krcher, a companybased in Germany, whose own website touts it as the most recognized and trusted namein high-pressure cleaning equipment, manuactures machines used to clean city wallsand public latrines. By proclaiming that he wanted to krcherize the racaille, Sarkozyevoked a specifc technology o urban cleansing that vividly illustrates the increasinglybrutal approach to the banlieue that marks French urban policy since the 1980s. TheKrcher water blaster is not a mere metaphor, but an actual machine used to scour gra-fti rom a variety o hard-to-clean suraces. Sarkozys comments thus equate banlieue

youth (la racaille) with their signs o passage through urban space (le gra, as graftiis oten called). The youngbanlieusards themselves become illegible signs on the newsmooth spaces o the HLM housing estates. The rhetorical dehumanization o youngpeople rom troubled neighborhoods, combined with hostility to grafti, reveals theneo-logocentrism operative in the penal republican state that reiterates colonialismspseudo-scientifc rationale or depriving supposedly illiterate peoples o history, reason,and even the very capacity or thought, a rationale that ultimately justifes their exclu-sion rom the entire chain o civilizational benefts and rights attendant upon literacyand reason. One piece o anti-Sarkozy grafti in Brest near theport de commerce, depict-ing Sarkozy as the national cop wielding a billy club, displays an explicit awareness othis interpretation o what nettoyer au Krcher means (fg. 1). Text accompanying thecartoonish caricature reads, Article 1: Nettoyage des graftis au Krcher (Article 1:Cleaning grafti with a Krcher).4

It would be an error, however, to suggest that the category, banlieue youth, existsindependent o the statements that construct it as an identifable group. Mustaa Dikesrecent demonstration o the way that French urban policy produces the banlieue asa space to be policed and contained also extends to the way that specifc groups within

these spaces are produced through the media, statistics, law, and other techniques.5 The


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act o naming the racaille eectively produces them as a social category precisely at thesame moment that the necessity o cleansing their living inscription rom the citis as-serted. I am calling this nettoyage or erasure o these groups neo-logocentric becausepart o its target is grafti, which, as I hope to demonstrate, represents an importantemerging global practice o inscription that produces multiple transnational connec-tions among ghettoized spaces around the world. Grafti unctions as a kind o alterna-tive literacy that operates within a plane that connects with literacy in the narrow senseo the term, but remains independent rom it. The strong reactions that grafti elicits,

as adduced by Sarkozys remarks (and one could cite dozens o other examples), suggestthat the new technologies o thought, mobility, and inscription that grafti engineersare what make it so dangerous to its detractors. These new orms o writing that grafti

produces are dismissed as mere vandalism;the situational critiques o power, space,and law that grafti traces are instead seenas unreadable marks o deflement anddelinquency. It is in this context o gra-

ftiunderstood as a critical practice owriting, defned primarily by its illegality,its ephemerality, and its public positioningagainst the logocentric state apparatusthat what I am calling nomad grammatol-ogy comes into play.

By grafti, I intend a heterogeneouscritical concept that intersects with the

variety o phenomena commonly calledtags, grafti, grafti art, pieces, murals,and stencils, but which does not exhausttheir potential. Not all actually existinggrafti does the things I suggest graftican do, even less does all grafti think inthe same way. That most ambivalent ourban signs, grafti indicates either urbandecay or youthul creativity; it evokes boththe illegible signs o gang violence and the

sublimation o art. The word grafti in a contemporary context can reer to almost anykind o marking. Even a cursory taxonomy o its orms would prompt a rather long listo styles, techniques, and schools. There are the supposedly lower orms, not easilycommodifed, such as quickly done tags, indicating just the pseudonym o a gang, a crew,or an individual; the more stylized hip-hop paintings or pieces, oten emphasizing theshape and outline o the letters; stencils, stickers, and posters o various kinds; and eventhe writing in bathroom stalls that Alan Dundes has termed latrinalia.6 Then there are

the assimilated or commodifed higher orms, such as grafti art hung in galleries (I

fue 1.

Grati depicting Nicolas Sarkozywith a billy clubBrest, France, 2005

Photo: Mathieu Gonnet


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What a Wall Wants, or How Graiti Thinks >> David Fieni 75

reer you to Le TAG au Grand Palais, at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in spring 2009, ea-turing over 300 works by graftists rom around the world, or the exhibition at the Fon-dation Cartier, N dans la rue, also in 2009); sponsored public art installations such asmurals; and the use o grafti-style onts or typography in advertising and merchandise.

In order to think about the specifc potential in grafti most relevant to the questiono walls, sovereignty, and ghettoized spaces, my use o the term will highlight three ele-ments o graftis feld o writing-production in particular: its illegality, anonymity, andephemerality. As understood in this paper, grafti is a ugitive set o illegal operations

perormed by semi-anonymous interacting bodies in motion. To see grafti rom this per-spective is also a way o underscoring the specifc position o the letters o grafti in rela-tion to the letter o the law; by defnition, the graftist positions him or hersel outside thelaw, while also writing on the very mate-rial suraces o the law (property, the wallsbuilt by the state); grafti does not simplystand outside or against the state, but al-ways links up with the state, disfgures the

representatives o the state, and becomesbarred by state science (what Deleuze andGuattari call royal science7). Grafti de-codes the perormances walls enact as atheatrical disavowal o the porousness osovereigntyby deorming, inating, play-ing with letters, making them something you can see but cannot necessarily read. Graftiwould have the letter o the law succumb to a liqueaction o its own material ontologi-

cal guarantee as public writing, at least at the moment o the encounter with grafti, atthe moment o inscription or viewing. Such a perspective also asserts the primacy o theact o writing over the written sign itsel. Grafti is never a product, always production,taking place in a heterogeneous time o improvised and contingent durations. Writersand bombers, as graftists call themselves, oten work at night, and they learn to writequickly while regularly glancing over their shoulder or the police. The time o erasureor overwriting prefgures all grafti: the time it takes or a tag or a piece to be crossedout by a rival, or to enter into improvised collaboration with other writers, or be paintedover by graftists who are serving time by doing community service to pay or their ownart crimesall o these durations inorm the act o writing on a wall as its preconditions.Nomad grammatology, then, is a feld o relations, interactions, marks, and erasures; itproceeds through the kind o nomad thought that Deleuze ound operative in both theNietzschean text and in the ethnographies o nomadic peoples discussed in both vol-umes oCapitalism and Schizophrenia. So, too, can the celebrated philosopher, JacquesDerrida, and the celebratedgraeur, NASTY, conduct grammatologys critique o pres-ence using radically dierent kinds o critical procedures and writing practices.

Nomad grammatology is not a theory o walls, grafti, mobility, illegality, or sover-

eignty; instead, it is a practice o reading and a orm o experimental cooperation be-

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tween dierent kinds o writing.8 Nomad grammatology does not claim to speak or thesubaltern; rather, it sees the positioning o subalternity and attempts to think in relationto this positioning. The surreal episode that Eyal Weizman describes inHollow Land, inwhich a special wing o the Israeli Deense Force theorized their tactical invasion andoccupation o the Casbah o Nablus in 2002an operation that consisted o Israeli sol-diers shooting and detonating their way directly through the walls dividing Palestinianliving rooms, bedrooms, and kitchens and that was explicitly theorized by the IDF asan attempt to smooth out space9can be read as a terrible validation o Deleuze and

Guattaris understanding o the relationship between the State and the nomadic warmachine. The integration o the nomad into the State, they write, is a vector travers-ing nomadism rom the very beginning, rom the frst act o war against the State.10 Thehorizon o their critique inA Thousand Plateaus is what they call the postascist fgureo war, in which the State aims to subsume the entire creative-violent feld set in motionby the war machine, in an act o total planetary containment. Whereas the war machineor Deleuze and Guattari is both external to the State and constituted by a perenniallysuspended possibility o subsumption into the State, postascist war aims at a global

smoothing out o space:The second, postascist, gure is that o a war machine that takes peace as its object directly,as the peace o Terror or Survival. The war machine reorms a smooth space that now claimsto control, to surround the entire earth. Total war itsel is surpassed, toward a orm o peacemore terriying still.11

Such a passage asserts that nomadic counterinsurgency tactics are written into the Stateapparatus, just as the State is written into the nomad war machine rom the beginning.

The possibility o Deleuze and Guattaris own nomad science being reormed orState action is thus already inscribed into the Treatise itsel. That their notions ospace and movement were reappropriated by a state that continues to justiy emergencyactions precisely in terms o Terror or Survival may be prooundly discouraging butin itsel proves nothing about the limitations o what these concepts can do or how theymay be used.12

This essay takes what Deleuze and Guattari called the integration o the nomad intothe State as a point o departure in its attempt to think what we might call the post-acist French ghetto with grafti and Deleuze and Guattari. To ask what a wall wantsand how grafti thinks in this context is to interrogate the historical processes by whichthe contemporary French State subsumes mobility and reorms smooth space, particu-larly in the exurban enclave known as the banlieue. Such questions also seek to locatethe materialist charge o writing practices that short-circuit the interval between theoryand practice. In a geopolitical moment increasingly marked by the erection o massiveborder walls, it becomes ever more important to consider how emerging ormations osovereignty at the national border also engineer and inorm the confguration o internalborders demarcating the spaces o the ghetto. Wendy Brown convincingly describes the

desire or the new walls marking national territory as part o an attempt to compensate


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or, or disavow, the twilight o democratic sovereignty around the globe. What is miss-ing rom her compelling argument is an account o grafti and activism as productionso radically dierent desires at the very site o these walls. What ollows is an attempt totrace how the demands made by such walls traverse graftis mobile script and to con-sider how grafti positions itsel in relation to the desire or walls in the context o thecollapsing orms o late-capitalist sovereignty.

As with Derridas grammatology, the thinking that grafti does aims at the undoingo logocentrism, or rather the neo-logocentrism that serves as the specifc prerogative

o what Deleuze and Guattari call the despotic signifer, which in France becomes mosteasily visible in the right hand o the one and indivisible French Republic. 13 In otherwords, grafti unctions as a mobile critique o the conditions o possibility o centralizedauthority that deploys power via techniques that are undamentally colonial in nature(exemplifed in the use o vocal power to capture desire and to spread the ear o con-tagion in order to justiy geographical containment or cleansing o perceived undesir-ables). What nomad grammatology deconstructsand I will develop this point through-out this essayis the perormance o the wall as stand-in or the absent authority o the

state. When the French Republic, say, has to deal with what Dike calls its badlands,what Ahmed Boubeker calls its internal rontiers,14 a repressed, archaic despotism re-emerges, dispatching citizens to the Oedipal fgure o state authority or saety, whichmay then recapture the desire unleashed by grafti and the racaille, both o which callorth exceptional police and state attention. In this connection, stencils o riot policeacommon fgure in contemporary grafti practiceperectly capture the imsy, two-dimensional, ghostlike avatars o the state ather haunting the walls erected to honor hissovereignty, walls that take the orm o an empty tomb (O signifer, terrible archaism

o the despot where they still look or theempty tomb, the dead ather, the mysteryo the name!).15 As Deleuze and Guattaripoint out, the mobile walls that representlate capitalisms ever-expanding zones osovereignty contain and activate an entirerepertoire o other orms o representationand social production. The more immov-able walls that once served to delineate thebody o the despotic sovereign state have been bricked up within the walls erected bycapital and only reemerge as an archaic orm o power. These walls within walls alignthemselves on capitalisms internal limit, which must constantly displace itsel, movingincrementally away rom the center in order to accommodate and temporarily containthe contradictions it generates. The grammatological critique perormed by grafti aims,in part, to locate the archaic, despotic, or colonial wall buried within the new smoothwalls o capital.

More specifcally, the concept o nomad grammatology derives rom Deleuze and

Guattaris discussion in the third chapter oAnti-Oedipus o the distinction Derrida

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draws between writing in the narrow sense (graphic notation on tangible material, inSpivaks gloss) and writing in the general sense (the durable institution o a sign).16 Whilethey express agreement with most o Derridas claims about the Western metaphysicalconstructions o the relationship between phonetic writing and the voice in O Gramma-tology, Deleuze and Guattari insist that these two kinds o graphismwriting in generaland writing in the restricted senseare two completely dierent orders o inscription.17Deleuze and Guattari align the regime o what they call primitive territorial representa-tion with writing in the general sense, locating it more on the side o dirance as pro-

ductive, generative meaning and less on the side o deerral and supplementarity:

The primitive territorial sign is sel-validating; it is a position o desire in a state o multipleconnections. It is not a sign o a sign nor a desire o a desire. It knows nothing o linear sub-ordination and its reciprocity: neither pictogram nor ideogram, it is rhythm and not orm,zigzag and not line . . . production and not expression.18

Whats at stake in this distinction or Deleuze and Guattari is both a concept o writingthat unctions via the primitive territorial sign, and also a version o the signiying

chain in which each sign may be removed rom the chain or replaced in it anywherewithout a collapse o the entire chain or a subordination o the remaining links to thedetached partial object.19 It would be more accurate to say that instead o a signiyingchain, Deleuze and Guattari open up the possibility o a signiying network. In this ge-nealogy o the way that desire is captured by Oedipus (who represents the ully colo-nized psyche under capitalist production), the regime o territorial representation indi-cates a kind o writing that would retain its autonomy rom the voice and would not bedependent on a chain o linear substitutions emerging rom an originary lack. For Deleuze

and Guattari, writing in the general sense is not the product o psychic repression; thisonly commences with the birth o imperial representation and the despotic signifer,which detaches itsel rom the chain o connections (or alliances) and claims sovereigntyand exceptional status or itsel.

Deleuze and Guattaris genealogy o three systems o desiring-production (the prim-itive, the imperial, and the capitalist machines) thus aims to introduce an interval intoDerridas understanding o grammatology at the precise point where Derrida wouldclose the gap between writing in a general sense and writing in a restricted sense inorder to mark the interval between graphism and logocentric phoneticism. Derridais right, Deleuze and Guattari afrm, in saying that, within writing in the narrow sense,hardly any breaks can be established between pictographic, ideogrammic, and phoneticprocedures: there is always and already an alignment on the voice, at the same timeas a substitution or the voice (supplementarity).20 However, there is indeed a breakthat changes everything in the world o representation, between this writing in thenarrow sense and writing in the broad sense.21 That is to say that rather than represent-ing some romanticized reusal o the very critique o logocentrism Derrida advances,the distinction they draw between primitive territorial graphism and barbaric or

imperial writing introduces a dirance within dirance itsel. It is not until the


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imperial ormation that makes graphism into a system o writing in the proper senseo the term, Deleuze and Guattari claim, that we have the kind o colonial drive o writ-ing as a system o signs.22 Despite certain willul misreadings o the book,Anti-Oedipusdoes not present a chronological narrative history o a development o writing systems,but instead demonstrates how dierent regimes o inscription might mix and mingle,traversing one another rom the outset, connecting up with and de-connecting romone another.23

The concept o nomad grammatology aims to cross the distributed combinatorics o

the so-called primitive territorial sign with the schizophrenic productive orce o thede-territorialized sign. In simpler terms, grafti creates a mobile geography, a new way orelating to the earth and marking ones position on it in a way that does not presupposea fxed, sedentary writer or reader. It bypasses technocratic legislative procedures andclaims an immediate right to the city, anidea whose importance Henri Leebvre a-frmed in the late 1960s, and which brieycirculated in early discussions o French

urban policy during the 1980s.24

Following Deleuze, I will entertain the(im)possibility that the desire o graftiis not constituted by an absence or a lack,nor is it complicit with the metaphysics opresence; rather, the marks o grafti areproductions and positions o desire in astate o multiple connections and constitute a realm that remains autonomous rom the

voice. At the same time, grafti is also caught up with territorializing impulses withincapitalisms vast de-territorializing movements o libidinal investment. And yet nomadgrammatology would, in a very specifc way, ollow Derridas dictum that the science owriting should thereore look or its object at the roots o scientifcity,25 which is whatDeleuze and Guattaris practice o nomad thought and their discussion o nomad orminor sciences aim at as well. What Derrida means by these roots o scientifcityis nuanced and complex, however, and or the purposes o the present demonstration Iwill only be indicating one aspect o this problem: the spatial nature o grammatologysfeld o operations. Deleuze and Guattari take up this issue specifcally in the Treatise

on Nomadology, when they write that nomad science is not a simple technology orpractice, but a scientifc feld in which the problem o these relations [between scienceand technology, science and practice] is brought out and resolved in an entirely dierentway than rom the point o view o royal science.26 In order to elucidate this assertion, itis important to indicate that the feld o nomad science they evoke in this passage romA Thousand Plateaus is itsel quite distinct rom the notion o a feld o knowledge ora feld o study used in everyday language. As opposed to the abstract delineations oepistemological boundaries disciplined by scientifc categorization, this feld surely

evokes the smooth spaces that Deleuze and Guattaris nomads occupy and hold: the

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vast Mongolian steppes, the uncharted ocean, and the nomos, or outskirtsone is tempt-ed to say, the banlieueo the ancient Greek polis.

The feld o graftis nomad science, on the other hand, is a smooth, heterogeneousspace: quite literally the striated space o the city lived smooth. Deleuze and Guat-taris example o the urban nomad is Henry Miller, who made Clichy and Brooklyndisgorge a patchwork, dierentials o speed, delays and accelerations, changes in ori-entation, continuous variations.27 A nomad grammatologist, such as lAtlas, Miss Tic, orNASCYO (to name a ew semi-anonymousgraeurs rom Paris and its banlieues), going

or a walk in the banlieue or the centre-ville, armed with an aerosol can or some stencils,cooperates with others to create collaborative, patchwork assemblages on the very wallsthat would serve as instruments o striation, enclosure, containment, and regulation.NASCYO, called one o the incontestable masters o French grafti, describes his ownwriting process thus: The problem is that I have no theme or plan at all. Every once ina while, I do sketches, but I never respect them. Its reestyle every time! (Le problmeest que je nai aucun thme ni aucun plan. De temps en temps, je ais des esquisses maisje ne les respecte jamais. chaque ois, cest du reestyle!)28 Living ugitive, unplanned

time, the graeur traverses the city step by step at ground level, proceeds in fts andstarts, guesses when to run or slow down based on her lived experience o the wall andthe street, and interacts with the aerosol can, marker, or stencil to constitute a mobile as-semblage oow. Such is the feld in which nomad science (or nomad grammatology)thinks its ugitive thoughts.

(The act o manipulating an aerosol spray can puts the writer in control o its com-bustible ow. As she writes, the graftist opens and shuts the hydraulic orce containedwithin the apparatus o the can, releasing the pent-up ow to fll or outline the letter.She applies pressure to the cap, which serves as both the button that activates the owand the opening through which it sprays out onto the wall. The laminar ow o paintbecomes conuent with the orce o the writers index fnger in conjunction with themusculature o the hand, which also interrupts the ow in short bursts, transorming themeasured release o paint into a turbulent one as the writers arm redirects it with thecalligraphic precision o the tag or the outline, and the broad sweeping zigzags that fllin the letter.)

And yet this is only part o the picture, since the feld o grafti comprehends the en-tire network o signs, including barring, painting over, krcherizing, the crossing out

o the tags o rival crews or gangs, all o which contribute to the graphic diagrammingo global literacies intersecting with illegal writing. Just as nomad grammatology is ascientifc practice that is painted over and krcherized by the state, nomad science,according to Deleuze and Guattari, is continually barred, inhibited, or banned by thedemands and conditions o State science.29 Grafti constitutes a very specifc kind onomad sciencea science o circulation without movement, o occupying and hold-ing smooth space, o reconstituting the new smooth spaces appropriated by the righthand o the state as nomadic smooth spaces. In an interview with an online magazine o

French urban culture, NASCYO explains how he came by his nom de mur:


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One day while out looking or tags with a guy who tagged as RORK, as we were walking inthe street, we ended up in ront o Nationale metro station. I raise my head up, I see the nameo the station and I got stuck on NATIO. Even more than the sound, I was really into thesequence o letters, so I kept it.30

NASCYO (aka NASCIO and NATIO) describes the feld o grafti as a space or interact-ing and experimenting with the writing o the city in a process o mutual disfguration.As the nation produces its margins and its marginalized in an act o erasure or distortion(the naming o spaces and people as in danger anddangerous), the graeur violentlytears the letters o the word nation out o context while also removing them romtheir dependence on the voice. Instead, he gets caught up in the sequence o letters seenas an abstract visual juxtaposition o de-territorialized signs. He rees the letters romthe despotic signifer o the state, puts them into a state o multiple connections witheach other, and then he writes them on a specifc wall in an act o reclaiming the city asa common space.31

>> Prsors/Toursts

Beore attempting to understand how grafti thinks about the walls demands in rela-tion to the banlieue, let us briey step back and examine two related issues: frst, theprolieration o new walls, border structures, and security ences being erected aroundthe globe and their relation to the emerging paradigms o global sovereignty; andsecond, dierent ways o thinking about and imagining the act o breaking through thesewalls. These considerations will allow us to understand how the production o Frenchspace is inected by orces operating on a global scale. In her recent meditation on the

apparent paradox between the decline o nation-state sovereignty and the renewed de-sire or walls, indicated by massive hi-tech projects such as the US-Mexico border wallor the Israeli Security Fence, Wendy Brownargues that these new walls hail the dislo-cation o sovereignty rom the nation-state and indicate the reemergence o religiousorms o sovereignty: The popular desire or walling harbors a wish or the powers oprotection, containment, and integration promised by sovereignty, a wish that recalls thetheological dimension o political sovereignty. Far rom representing the reemergenceo nation-state sovereignty, walls, Brown argues, are a visual means o restoring . . . psy-

chic insulation. They help to restore images o national sel-sufciency, and they help toscreen out suering or destitution.32 They are built to contain the stateless, not othersovereign nation-states. They respond to a permanent state o emergency and lawless-ness, producing the margins that separate the inside o the nation-state rom its outside,the legal rom the illegal. Brown challenges the accounts o critics such as Mike Daviswho oversimpliy the issue by claiming that the new walls constitute the ideal regula-tory scheme or neoliberalism, regulating ows o labor and goods while permitting theunrestricted ow o capitalher argument, on the other hand aims to account or theperormative power o walls.33 One could go a step urther and claim that the perorma-


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tive, theatrical aspect o such walls serves primarily to distract the audience rom theactual unction o the wall, which is simply to ensure the steady ow o global capital.

This perormative unction o walls is in act a central moti that recurs throughoutthe third section oAnti-Oedipus in the guise o the wall o the signifer. By designat-ing the signifer as a kind o wall, Deleuze and Guattari are showing how the signiferoperates on the same plane as the great walls o the imperial (or despotic) system odesiring-production (and it is in this connection that Kakas story, The Great Wall oChina, makes a cameo in the text). In act, the signifer is the deterritorialized sign

itsel,34 i.e., that part o the sign that has broken ree rom the specifc site o libidinalinvestment designated by the reerent. The wall and the signifer are both despotic, then,in the sense that they both disfgure what they supposedly represent: the signifer disfg-ures the signifed, while the wall disfgures the territory o the despotic state. Signiferand wall mangle, master, and distort what they would claim to serve. It is at this pointthat the key elements o new walls in Browns accountperormance and regulationmap onto Deleuze and Guattaris notions o the despotic signifer as a specter hauntingcapitalism. Browns understanding o the double unction o new walls allows us to align

the signiferas a specifc unction within a logocentric conception o languagealongthe internal limit o capitalist production as understood by Deleuze and Guattari. Theyconceive this internal limit o capitalism as constitutive o capitalisms minimal condi-tions o identity, meaning the limit, which i crossed, would mean the end o capital andthe beginning o a new mode o production on the other side o the ruins o capital. En-gineering ways o breaking through this wall is the positive task repeatedly articulatedin Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

The positive and negative tasks o schizoanalysis both inscribe themselves on thefgure o the wall. The negative task is the critical genealogy o systems o representa-tion in Anti-Oedipus that ultimately shows how the primitive territorial sign and thedespotic sign are both embedded within and dominated by capitalisms own system orepresentation, which unctions through constant inscription and erasure, coding anddecoding, on the mobile walls o capital itsel. The very clear target at which the posi-tive task o schizoanalysis takes aim is the total enclosure o the earth by these mov-ing walls o capital, circumscribing space on a global scale. The positive task, then, isto set in motion ows that might break through these new global walls o capital, thesignifer, and Oedipus. This ocus on ree-oating desire as a political tool or smashing

capitalism has received extensive criticism: it is precisely this aspect o Deleuze, or ex-ample, that Slavoj iek considers most regrettable, the emphasis on pure Becomingthat marks what iek calls the guattarized Deleuze.35 However, I am not interested inusing Deleuze and Guattari to supplement grafti with theoretical legitimacy or to usegrafti to prove the ideas in Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Rather, I want to put thesedierent kinds o writingDeleuze and Guattari and graftiinto contact with eachother in order to deamiliarize each o them. To recast ieks description o his critiqueo Deleuze in the ramework o nomad grammatology, I want to trace the contours o

an encounter between two incompatible felds,36 especially since the felds in question


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present so many similar surace eatures to the eye o the reader. What is more, nomadgrammatology in no way intends a reconciliation between nomadology and grammatol-ogy, between, on the one hand, a Derridean, or indeed a Lacanian afrmation o a lackthat would be generative o meaning and would constitute language as a feld o ree-play, and on the other, the Deleuzo-Guattarian reusal o the logic o supplementarityin their account o the primitive territorial sign. The relation between nomadology andgrammatological critique is anamorphic, i anything; what appears as a productive lackrom one angle appears as a position o desire rom another. It is thereore not a question

oaccommodatingDerrida, Deleuze, or grafti. The question, rather, is this: what woulda grammatology o the grafti war machine look like?

Grafti and schizoanalysis both conceive o their tasks as the creation o nomadicwar machines used or breaking through walls. The late New York City gaftist, hip-hop artist, and sculptor, Rammellzee understood grafti as Gothic Futurism, whichhe envisioned as a war o graftic letters against alphabetization: We didnt call our-selves grafti-writers, Rammellzee, said, we called ourselves bomberswe were inthe militarymilitary aint got nothing to do with what anybody says.37 Deleuze and

Guattari suggest a variety o ways that writing can break through the wall o the signiferand unleash ows o desire: externally, by fgurative images, and internally, by the purefgures that compose letters. The ollowing description, inspired by Lyotard, could eas-ily be describing the rhizome o a grafti mural or piece:

In language and in writing itsel, sometimes the letters as breaks, as shattered partial objectsand sometimes the words as undivided ows, as nondecomposable blocks, or ull bodies. . . constitute assigniying signs that deliver themselves over to the order o desire. . . . Theybreak through this wall so as to set ows in motion, and establish breaks that overow or

rupture the signs conditions o identity . . . always passing underneath the signier, lingthrough the wall.38

Pieces by graeur Djalouz recently created in the area near the rue de lErmitage in the20th arrondissement in Paris give us letters that melt like Dalis clocks, while anotherpiece along the rue Dnoyez transorms the act o writing into a kind o runic metal-lurgy combining nomadic writing with an evocation o the crat (metallurgy) that helpednomads develop their war machine (fg. 2). Another piece eaturing the fgure o agrotesque mouth in turn makes the letters grotesque, giving them a quasi-organic quality

that is both nondecomposable and inorme, ormless. At the same time, the pure fg-ures that compose the letters reroute the circuits o the signifer, slithering underneathit and around it, even as the painted wall reveals the real wall as itsel a simulacrum.39

British graftist Banksys series o stencils appointing specifc walls in London asdesignated grafti areas provides a dierent strategy or setting the ows o grafti inmotion with minimal eort. Photographs o grafti in books, flms, and on the internetlike in situ graftiserve more as a mode demploi than as a collection o visual objects.Even more provocative are the now notorious pieces Banksy has done on what he calls

the Palestinian Segregation Wall, which he claims to be the worlds largest open-air

fue 2.

Grati byDjalouzrue Dnoyez, Paris, 2009


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84 DIACRITICS >> 2012 >> 40.2

prison and the ultimate activity holiday destination or grafti artists. 40 While many othese pieces visualize various ways o breaking through the wall or o climbing or risingover it, they become most captivating when they connect with the marks o other writ-ers. One image painted on the wall eatures a uniormed fgure pulling back a section othe wall, reimagined as an elastic curtain, to reveal a photo-realistic image o a sea thatlies beyond. Adjacent to this image, someone has written, al-Mubadarah al-Wat.aniyyahal-Filist.iniyyah, or the Palestinian National Initiative, the political party ounded in2002 by Mustaa Barghouti that takes a nonviolent, secular letist position. Another im-

age eatures a stencil o an Israeli tank being towed away, next to which someone haswritten in Arabic the name o the Islamist party, Hamas (H. arakat al-Muqawamah al-Islamiyya). The stenciled black and white image o a child painting a ladder by hand, andindicating a vertical ascension only available to antasy, intersects with the horizontalArabic grafti, non-stylized and only partially readable in this image (fg. 3). The Arabicconsists o what appear to be inscriptions by dierent writers, but whose words play oo each other in interesting ways. The Arabic phrase that transects the ladder reads, thewall will not divide us (al-jidar lan yas.il baynina), words that use the wall as a writing

surace or expressing its impotence as a strategy o division.These collaborations do not simply represent the merging o anonymous internation-al networks in solidarity with Palestine, however, but rather they illustrate radically di-erent relationships with the wall itsel. Banksys deliberately coy images o escape andbreaking through the wall indicate his own mobility as a British citizen, on the ultimateactivity holiday. The slogans in Arabic, on the other hand, all point toward a desire ornational solidarity (understood in very dierent ways), expressed in defance oandonthe very wall that limits the mobility o Palestinians. Banksy himsel alludes to thesedierent relationships with the wall in a ragment o dialogue printed next to the pictureo two oversized, cartoonish easy chairs raming a picture window that opens onto theimage o a mountain scene:

Old Man You paint the wall, you make it look beautiul.Me Thanks.Old Man We dont want it to be beautiul, we hate this wall, go home.41

Like the juxtaposition o this conversation with the images in Banksys book, there issomething compelling about the combination o Banksy and Arabic grafti. The Arabic

slogans and Banksys images seem drawn to each other. These collaborations give thelocal grafti the degree o visual mobility, via their dissemination through the mass me-dia, promised to the work o the worlds most amous anonymous artist. They also in-dicate the excruciating proximity o the worlds prisoners and tourists, and the way thatwalls want dierent things rom dierent people.


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fue 3.

Grati byBanksyAbu Dis, Palestine, 2005

Photo courtesy o Banksy


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86 DIACRITICS >> 2012 >> 40.2

>> Th Blu s Wlld Cty

Finally, ater these peregrinations rom Sarkozy to Jerusalem, the discussion returns tothe banlieue. This last section briey examines graftic practice in relation to the Parisianbanlieue not just as a orm o writing that disfgures the walls o the city but as a way oreconfguring the space o the banlieue experienced as a walled city. By tagging walls andmobile objects in the city, writers are responding to what is perceived as an abandonmentby French society and the state, a perception that ironically coincides with the Republics

increased data collection, surveillance o, and interest in les quartiers sensibles, or sensi-tive neighborhoods. As Dike has demonstrated, French urban policy, which was bornduring the 1980s out o a concern or social justice, has becoming increasingly ocused onpenal justice and security.42 Without directly comparing the French banlieue with the Gazastrip or East Jerusalem, I would like to argue that the space o the French urban ghetto isexperienced as a kind o reugee camp or walled city. This meaning is, o course, embed-ded in the French word, cit, which carries with it the history o the walled medieval city(as in le de la Cit), conceived as an independent political unity, a unity that was achieved

in the act o sel-enclosure and turning in on itsel. In contemporary usage, a citreersto a distinct group o buildings organized around a unifed plan, and usually connotesthe poor, working-class areas o the banlieue. President Jacques Chiracs insistence in2003 that sensitive urban areas (zones urbaines sensibles) do not orm a marginalFrance ironically makes clear that the contrary is in act a common perception thatneeds to be disavowed.43 The 2004 French action flm,Banlieue 13, produced and cow-ritten by Luc Besson, opens its stylized and sensationalist dystopian vision o the Parisregion in the year 2010 with the ollowing explanation: As crime spirals out o controlin certain banlieues, the government constructs a wall around the highest risk housingprojects (Devant la monte incontournable de la criminalit dans certaines banlieues, legouvernement autorise la construction dun mur disolement autour des cits classes haut risque). Mixing plot elements romEscape rom New York with the action sequenc-es o a video game, the flm depicts the walled citas a reugee camp where grafti is anecessary part o the ghetto dcor, drug lords rule the day, and machine-gun-wieldingsoldiers stand guard at checkpoints. In one memorable scene, a police ofcer posing asan escaped convict tells a resident o the B13 that he came there seeking reuge. Theresident laughs, saying, This aint Monaco, its Baghdad! Such a flm presents as slick,

hi-tech antasy the kernel o the truth o Frances urban ghettos.As external orces produce urban space as a danger to be contained, so do the inhab-

itants generate their own orms o reuge and isolation. The process o ghettoization,as Didier Lapeyronnie argues in Ghetto urbain, consists in a mutual act o social andpolitical isolation. Social groups in the ghetto, Lapeyronnie claims, tend to contractin on themselves; they erect walls and barriers to protect themselves rom what theyperceive to be threats to their security or status.44 To be sure, much grafti unctionsto delineate exclusive spaces o reuge in the banlieue in an entirely territorial manner.

This territorial element in much grafti occurs as a kind o neo-archaic practice even as


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the capitalist de-territorialization machine continues to sweep over the earth, the city,the body, reinvesting desire wherever it can. The graftists themselves come rom theterritorial order, Jean Baudrillard wrote in Kool Killer, or The Insurrection o Signs.They territorialise decoded urban spacesa particular street, wall or district comes tolie through them, becoming a collective territory again. They do not confne themselvesto the ghetto, they export the ghetto through all the arteries o the city.45 Since Baudril-lard wrote his treatise about grafti in New York City in 1975 the world has seen graftiexport the ghetto on a global scale, just as global capital has continued to produce these

ghettos. And just as France is oten described as the second home o hip-hop ater NewYork, so is it also viewed as the second home o grafti.

As the pioneers o post-May 68 French grafti tell it, grafti, as an element ohip-hop culture, frst migrated to Paris rom New York City in the mid-1980s, as Euro-pean writers such as Blek le Rat (rom Paris) and SHOE (rom Amsterdam) began toimprovise on New York style, orming crews with French writers like Bando andMode2. We elt like we were the ambassadors in Europe o this whole new thing o gra-fti, says SHOE in the flm Writers: 20 ans de grafti Paris. Grafti in France emerges

as a nomadic and transnational orm o experimental inscription and circulation in urbanspace. Another early writer, Shuck 2, talks about the explosion o grafti that occurredbetween 1984 and 1990: People didnt know what was happening to them. We all cameup rom the banlieue to tear up Paris (pour dchirer Paris). . . . They had abandoned usin la citand lied to us since we were little.46 Against the argument that grafti is aorm o pathological narcissism, an attempt by the abandoned child to gain the loveand attention o a neglectul or distant ather (or patrie), which is how politicians andpolice tend to interpret acts o vandalism, I would suggest that grafti is in act thevery production o the desire or mobility. When New York City began to pull subwaycars that had been tagged or bombed rom the tracks, subway car grafti slowly cameto a halt as well. Must this be interpreted as a case o young vandals who are look-ing or sel-publicity, as one MTA ofcial claimed, or aiming to become an impresarioo his own appearance, o his own artifce, as Baudrillard described the desirebehind grafti?47 A somewhat less psychologizing, less deterministic view might sug-gest that writers who tag mobile objects are looking to take their name out or a rideon the body without organs, on the ull body o capital, transorming the striated cityinto smooth space. The white delivery van serves as another ideal medium or putting

tags into circulation through the city. (The photo-sharing website, Flickr, has a groupnamed Grafti Van that contains over 2,600 photographs o vandalized vans, over 900o them taken in Paris.)

It may be tempting to understand vandalism as an act o ressentiment targeting thesymbols o social mobility that the vandals are denied. (Alec Hargreaves, or example,interprets the burning o cars during the 2005 riots in this manner.48) Yet an active, afr-mative element coexists with what is perceived as negative and merely reactive. Mettrela rage aux autres (flling others with rage) is howgraeur, NASTY, describes his avor-

ite part o writing on metro cars. He continues: Voir la gueule des mecs quand il voit les


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88 DIACRITICS >> 2012 >> 40.2

photos du mtro que tu as tap ! Cest mon adrnaline ! (To see peoples aces when theysee the picture you just knocked o! Thats my adrenaline!) In any case, graftis sub-versive litany o anonymity (as Baudrillard called it49) orces us to think about it beyondpsychology and identity politics. Instead, grafti compels thinking to move in dierentfelds o knowledge and to see the empty signifers that cannot be read.

From the highly visible walls on the banks o the Seine, to the neglected walls o lesterrains vagues in and around the city, to the walls o the HLM in the banlieue, walls donot simply symbolize the various orms o neocolonial exclusion, confnement, or im-

mobility generated as a unction o race, class, or gender; walls, I am arguing, have cometo signiy the very mobility o capital itsel.Just as the new walls prolierating aroundthe globe stage an archaic perormance odespotic sovereignty that continues to pro-duce a xenophobic sense o nationhood50and ence out the stateless (and the quasi-stateless) rom the spaces o capital and

democracy, so, too does French urban pol-icy construct its own internal rontierspoliced by its own Oedipal ather, bothdesired and elected. So what does a wall

want? It wants to distract usall o us, the included and the excluded, those who arewalled in as well as those who are walled outrom its regulatory unction by entrancingus with its perormative, theatrical one. A wall wants to move. It wants mobility. It wantsthe mobility denied to those it contains.

How does grafti think in this context? Graftis feld o nomad grammatology in-scribes both its critical andits creative tasks on walls. It teaches us that walls are notsimply symbols o ow but that walls are in act moving. Grafti on these walls scramblethe codes used to negotiate the contradictions o capitalist democracies, evoking at oncepost-civilized wilderness and neo-tribal anarchistic glee and terror. Grafti draws a dia-gram o the ows o capital channeled and distributed by walls, reminding us both othe despot bricked up inside them and o his logocentric hollowness; simultaneously, itholds up the possibility o breaking through this wall o the signifer, which is also thewall o capitals mobile inner limit. Grafti decodes the wall as exchequer o ow. Not

simply an ontology o the trace (as in the canonical I was here but I disappeared) oro presence (as in the piece by lAtlas on the quai Malaquais that reads I am here! inEnglish, while disguised as geometrical Kufc Arabic script), but as a passage o desiring-production that is not defned by its negation, erasure, or lack, but rather by its positionon this wallat this timethat stayed or this amount o time. I walls want our mobility,then grafti demonstrates that another kind o mobility is possible.

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sks ws. i s s ws

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I would like to thank the Andrew W. Mellon Founda-tion, which unded a ellowship at Cornell University.Special thanks are also due to Laurent Dubreuil orinviting me to present the lecture rom which thecurrent essay developed, and to Shawkat Toorawah,Cornell University Department o Near Eastern Stud-ies, who invited me to present a lecture on grati inPalestine. Chris Garcs gave me invaluable eedbackon various drats o this essay and provided muchneeded intellectual riendship and encouragement.This essay also greatly beneted rom conversa-tions and comments rom Eleanor Kauman, TracyMcNulty, Natalie Melas, Ruth Maas, Jeremy Foster,

Mitchell Greenberg, Laurent Ferri, Esther Fernandez,Christine Leuenberger, and Marie-Claire Vallois.

1 Sarkozys comments were published in LeMonde on June 21, 2005 and video clips o hiscomments were televised during news broadcasts insubsequent days. The video is also readily ound onwebsites such as YouTube.

2 See Charles Bremner, Suburbs Are Ablaze with

Anger, The Times (London), November 3, 2005 andDoug Ireland, Why is France Burning? The Rebelliono a Lost Generation, Direland(blog), November 6,2005. http://direland.typepad.com/direland/2005/11/why_is_rance_b.html#comment-11026593

3 Laurent Greilsamer, Le chifre et le mot, LeMonde, November 8, 2005.

4 Two photographs o this image areposted online at http://www.ickr.com/photos/mathgon/2483883635/ and http://www.ickr.com/photos/23058528@N02/3247405170/.

5 See Dike, Badlands o the Republic.

6 Dundes, The American Concept o Folklore,238.

7 The pair develop the concept o royal sciencein the Treatise on Nomadology in A Thousand

Plateaus. See especially 36768 and 374.

8 My use o the term cooperation correspondsquite closely to its unction in the work o AntonioNegri and Michael Hardt, which develops the claimthat cooperation is immanent to the orms o imma-terial labor that increasingly constitute global produc-tion in a postmodern economy. They write that todayproductivity, wealth, and the creation o social surplus-es take the orm o cooperative interactivity throughlinguistic, communicational, and afective networks.In the expression o its own creative energies, im-material labor thus seems to provide the potential ora kind o spontaneous and elementary communism(Hardt and Negri, Empire, 294). Grati unctions

as just such a spontaneous orm o creative labor,whose cooperative potential multiplies exponentiallywhen the grati tag is reproduced, digitally tagged,and then shared through online networks. A subse-quent essay on this topic develops the concept otagging as a kind o overwriting that coordinatesgeographically specic mobile texts with non-geographically specic writing, such as those seenin the Arab Spring, where grati, posters, signs, andsocial media all played important roles.

9 Weizman, Hollow Land, 201.

10 Deleuze and Guattari,A Thousand Plateaus, 420.

11 Ibid., 421.

12 This assertion runs counter to the contempo-rary critique o Deleuzes non-relational, unmedi-ated notion o ontological univocity understood (ormisunderstood) as a vitalist celebration o corporealityand pure ux. Deleuze and Guattaris concept onetworked singularities, Slavoj iek points out, bearsan uncanny resemblance to the actually existingstrategies and circuitries o global capital itsel (seeiek, Organs without Bodies). Few philosophershave been as inspiring as Deleuze, Peter Hallwardconesses. But those o us who still seek to changeour world and to empower its inhabitants will need tolook or our inspiration elsewhere (Out o This World,

ns


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90 DIACRITICS >> 2012 >> 40.2

164). In his evaluation, Hallward engages closelywith the continuity o Deleuzes philosophy in all itsnotorious complexity, but at one point he supportshis rejection o Deleuze (as a source o inspiration orradical thought) by reerencing a specic way that theFrench thinker has been used not in theory but as amatter o practical application. Hallward goes so aras to claim that in a perverse twist o ate, it may bethat today, in places like Palestine, Haiti and Iraq, theagents o imperialism have more to learn rom Deleu-zian rhizomatics than do their opponents (ibid., 163).This speculation is supported by a ootnote (186n17)reerring to Weizmans work on the use o theoretical

texts by Deleuze, Guattari, and Guy Debordamongothersby the Israeli Deense Force or the purposeo developing new military counter-insurgency tacticsto be used against Palestinians. In his groundbreak-ing work on architecture and the politics o spacein Israel/Palestine, Weizman goes into detail aboutthe IDFs use o Deleuze and others, but ultimatelychooses not to condemn the theorists whose workhas been appropriated or practical purposes at oddswith the explicitly critical aims o such work. Hallwardsreerence to this incident, however, helps to highlightnomad grammatologys prerogative on the use-valueo theory or practice. His recourse to empiricalproo to support his position in this one instance (theootnote to Weizman) ironically betrays the stark actthat his approach to Deleuze is, in the words o JohnProtevi, theoretical, all-too-theoretical (Protevi,review oOut o This World, nal par.).

13

This essay takes Derridas elaboration o logo-centrism in O Grammatologyas a point o departurein order to think about the broad set o reectionsconcerning the ways that language might be said tocolonize its users. Derrida opens up this theme in OGrammatologyand urther develops it in later works,most notably in The Crisis in the Teaching o Phi-losophy, a lecture given in Benin at a 1978 conerenceo Arican philosophers. Both texts develop a critiqueo the hegemonic conception ola languemeaning a

given language understood as a cohesive and unitary

object that can be made to unction as a prosthesis oorigin. My own use o the term logocentrism is in-ormed by the Derridean critique as it might relate toFrench republican discourse about social and culturalormations that would be made to adhere to the idealo the one and indivisible nation. My contention isthat the anxieties elicited by grati deserve to be readwithin this general rubric, but also that Deleuze andGuattaris claims about graphism open up productiveways o reading logocentrism, grammatology, andgrati.

14 Boubeker, Vaulx-en-Velin dans la guerre desimages, 87.

15 Deleuze and Guattari,Anti-Oedipus, 2089.

16 Spivak, Translators Preace, lxix; Derrida, OGrammatology, 44.


18 Ibid.

19 Ibid., 206.

20 Ibid., 2023.

21 Ibid., 203.

22 Ibid., 202.

23 This question o the relationship between theseregimes o signs outlined by Deleuze and Guat-tari and the historically and geographically speciccontexts with which they are associated is examined

at length in Miller, Nationalists and Nomads, 171240.This chapter rom Millers book, originally publishedin diacritics 23, no. 3 (1993), also spawned a heateddebate between Miller and Deleuze scholar EugeneHolland that unolded in the pages oResearch in

Arican Literatures. Miller questions Deleuze andGuattaris claims that they are neither represent-ing so-called primitive peoples nor doing historyin their work on the diferent regimes o signs theyexamine (including the nomadic). He attacks the

91


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ethics o their methodology, which would base itsthinking on ethnographic research o specic societieswhile also distancing itsel rom ethnography. Holland,in his review o the book, takes Miller to task or whathe sees as a proound misreading that makes littleattempt to understand Deleuze and Guattari on theirown terms. Holland concludes that it is both dispirit-ing and inuriating to see a vibrant and challengingthought-experiment crushed under the boot-heelo supposed immediate political relevance (Rep-resentation and Misrepresentation in PostcolonialLiterature and Theory, 165). See also Miller, WeShouldnt Judge Deleuze and Guattari: A Response

to Eugene Holland.24 Dike, Badlands o the Republic, 14.

25 Derrida, O Grammatology, 27.

26 Deleuze and Guattari,A Thousand Plateaus, 367.

27 Ibid., 482.

28 NASCYO, interview, 90bpm.com, December 1,2002, http://www.90bpm.net/interview/01122002,668-nascyo.htm

29 Deleuze and Guattari,A Thousand Plateaus,362.

30 Un jour, alors quon cherchait des noms degueuta [verlan or tag] avec un mec qui tagguaitRORK, en marchant dans la rue, on tombe devant lastation de mtro Nationale. Je lve la tte, je vois lenom de la station et jai bloqu sur NATIO. En plus

de la sonorit, je kifais bien sur lenchanement deslettres donc je lai gard (NASCYO, interview).

31 An example o a large piece written by NA-SCYO on a delivery truck may be viewed by scrollinghalway down to the seventh image on the site below,to a truck painted with silver letters outlined in green,posted by user nikola: http://www.90bpm.net/o-rum/index.php?PHPSESSID=daa68a9ba0bc3d56b7c61242a9ea5&topic=22017.msg341348#msg341348.

32 Brown, Walled States, 26, 121.

33 Ibid., 98.

34

Deleuze and Guattari,Anti-Oedipus

, 206.35 iek, Organs without Bodies, 18.

36 Ibid., xxi.

37 Reiss, Bomb It.


39 A superb (although discontinued) blog showingwork along the rue de lErmitage, Gra lErmitage,

can be ound at http://grafalermitage.blogspot.com/.For a collection o pieces by Djalouz, see Le Photo-Gra Collecti: http://photografcollecti.blogspot.com/search/label/Dja%27louz.

40 Banksy, Wall and Piece, 110.

41 Ibid., 116.

42 Dike, Badlands o the Republic, 12526.

43 This statement is taken rom a speech thatChirac gave on urban renewal in Valenciennes onOctober 21, 2003. The speech was republished inChirac, Mon combat pour la France; quoted textappears on 136.

44 Lapeyronnie, Ghetto urbain, 14, 15.

45 Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 79.

46 Reiss, Bomb It.

47 Baudrillard, The Look Generation, 41.

48 See Hargreaves, An Emperor with No Clothes?

49 Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 84.

50 Brown, Walled States, 94

92 DIACRITICS 2012 40 2


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Banksy. Wall and Piece. London: Century, 2006.

Baudrillard, Jean. The Look GenerationThe Man-nerism o a World Without Manners. In Baudrillard

Live: Selected Interviews, edited by Mike Gane,4142. New York: Routledge, 1993.

. Symbolic Exchange and Death. Sage: London,1993.

Boubeker, Ahmed. Vaulx-en-Velin dans la guerredes images: Les vnements doctobre 1990 etlexprience de la visibilit publique. In Les alas dulien social: Constructions identitaires et culturelles

dans la ville, edited by Jean Mtral, 87101. Paris:La Documentation ranaise, 1997.

Brown, Wendy. Walled States, Waning Sovereignty.New York: Zone Books, 2010.

Chirac, Jacques. Mon combat pour la France: Textes etinterventions, 19952007. Paris: Odile Jacob, 2007.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Flix Guattari.Anti-Oedipus:Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: Univer-

sity o Minnesota Press, 1983..A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizo-

phrenia. Minneapolis: University o MinnesotaPress, 1987.

Derrida, Jacques. The Crisis in the Teaching o Phi-losophy. In Who's Araid o Philosophy?: Right toPhilosophy 1, 99116. Stanord: Stanord UniversityPress, 2002.

. Monolingualism o the Other, Or, The Prosthesiso Origin. Stanord: Stanord University Press, 1998.

. O Grammatology. Translated by GayatriChakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 1997.

Dike, Mustaa. Badlands o the Republic: Space,Politics, and Urban Policy. Malden, MA: Blackwell,2007.

Dundes, Alan. The American Concept o Folklore.Journal o the Folklore Institute 3, no. 3 (1966):22649.

Hallward, Peter. Out o This World: Deleuze and thePhilosophy o Creation. London: Verso, 2006.

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cam-bridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.

Hargreaves, Alec G. An Emperor with No Clothes?Riots in France (blog), November 28, 2005. http://riotsrance.ssrc.org/Hargreaves/.

Holland, Eugene W. Representation and Misrepre-

sentation in Postcolonial Literature and Theory.Research in Arican Literatures 34, no. 1 (2003):15973.

Lapeyronnie, Didier, with Laurent Courtois. Ghettourbain: Sgrgation, violence, pauvret en France

aujourd'hui. Paris: Lafont, 2008.

Leebvre, Henri. The Urban Revolution. Minneapolis:University o Minnesota Press, 2003.

Miller, Christopher L. Nationalists and Nomads: Essayson Francophone Arican Literature and Culture.Chicago: University o Chicago Press, 1998.

. We Shouldnt Judge Deleuze and Guattari: AResponse to Eugene Holland. Research in AricanLiteratures 34, no. 3 (2003): 12941.

NASCYO. Interview. 90bpm.com. http://www.90bpm.net/grati/interview/nascyo.htm.

Protevi, John. Review oOut o This World: Deleuzeand the Philosophy o Creation, by Peter Hallward.Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, August 3, 2007.http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cm?id=10564.

Reiss, Jon. Bomb It: The Global Grafti Documentary.Docurama, 2008. DVD.

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Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Translators Preace toO Grammatology, by Jacques Derrida, ixlxxxvii.Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

Vecchione, Marc-Aurle. Writers, 19832003: 20 ansde grafti Paris. Resistance Films, 2004.

Weizman, Eyal. Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture oOccupation. London: Verso, 2007.

iek, Slavoj. Organs without Bodies: Deleuze andConsequences. New York: Routledge, 2004.

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What a Wall Wants, Or How Graffiti Thinks: Nomad Grammatology in the French Banlieue

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