"I remember that I am invisible and walk softly so as not to awaken the sleeping one's. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers."
Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man
It is specifically the visibility of tagging, serving no other end than itself, being where it should not be, that render it unseeable in any aesthetic particularity. Tagging does possess a language of form, a history of style. But in every sense of both its form, its content and its history, tagging is criminal, it is obscene. It is primarily the heterogeneity of tagging that cloaks it, and secondly its inexplicable sovereignty.
Like Ellison's invisible man, the tag, as the heterogeneous, the excluded, becomes a site where others see not what is there but rather project their own fears and desires. Thus the tag is a sign of juvenile delinquency, a sign of crime and fear, a sign of decline; or else it is a Utopian desire for collective property, or an expression of class interest. The tag is what returns, the nub of the repressed that, like exposed genitals, both obscene and desirable, pokes into the public gaze. In its polysemy, the tag, as writing, is a Pharmakon. Pharmakon can mean all of the following -- remedy, poison (either the cure or the illness or its cause), philter, drug, recipe, charm, medicine, substance, spell, artificial color, and paint. Seeing is always an act of interpretation, and the tag is interpreted mostly as a poison, sometimes as a remedy or medicine, and, for the writer, often as a spell of immanence, an incantation of risk that must be written and re-written.
Like Ellison's invisible man, the tag, as the heterogeneous, the excluded, becomes a site where others see not what is there but rather project their own fears and desires. Thus the tag is a sign of juvenile delinquency, a sign of crime and fear, a sign of decline; or else it is a Utopian desire for collective property, or an expression of class interest. The tag is what returns, the nub of the repressed that, like exposed genitals, both obscene and desirable, pokes into the public gaze. In its polysemy, the tag, as writing, is a Pharmakon. Pharmakon can mean all of the following -- remedy, poison (either the cure or the illness or its cause), philter, drug, recipe, charm, medicine, substance, spell, artificial color, and paint. Seeing is always an act of interpretation, and the tag is interpreted mostly as a poison, sometimes as a remedy or medicine, and, for the writer, often as a spell of immanence, an incantation of risk that must be written and re-written.
"In this undecidability, in this non-substance and non-locality, the pharmakon places itself outside the dialectical system and opens a labyrinth or an abyss. This does not turn pharmakon into a transcendental. It is not above the play of delay and difference, rather it is permeated by these. Pharmakon is not the name for the other, but the place where the other is evoked"
Jaques Derrida
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