ENGL 3860: Metaphysical Graffiti Slide Deck

P#UB$LICS@ 

metaPhysical 

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Graffiti 

ENGL 3860 | Nathaniel A. Rivers | saint louis university | fall 2023

Publics are spheres that emerge 

and decay through the 

entanglement and circulatory 

coproduction of online and off-line 

networks. 

hawk | Public Spheres | 150

The public A public Discursive Publics Counterpublics 

The public, for Warner, is 

the imagined social totality 

of a nation or community 

that depends on rhetoric as 

transparent, rational, and 

deliberative; on institutionally 

sanctioned genre, 

speech acts, and speech 

s i t u a t i o n s ; a n d o n a 

hierarchy that counts some 

activities as public and 

others as private. As a result, 

certain dominant groups of 

people are more likely to 

stand in for the social 

totality as opposed to 

others (423). 

A public, in contrast, is 

a concrete audience 

g a t h e r e d a t a 

particular time and in 

a particular place 

whose boundaries are 

more or less distinct— 

an audience for a 

c o n c e r t , p l a y, o r 

political rally. 

Discursive publics only come 

into existence via the circulation 

of texts. A book, for example, 

isn’t bounded by space and time 

in the way that a public is, and its 

genre and circulation aren’t 

limited to the public. Instead they 

e x h i b i t s e v e n p r i m a r y 

characteristics: they are selforganized, 

a relation among 

strangers, both personal and 

impersonal, constituted through 

attention, c re a t e d b y t h e 

reflexive circulation of discourse, 

s t r u c t u r e d a c c o r d i n g t o 

temporality, and a product of 

poetic world making (413). 

Counterpublics are special 

cases of discursive publics that 

are marked by nondominant 

discursive practices. Because 

they don’t have access to the 

public and its forms and forums 

of speech, they run counter to 

dominant genres and modes of 

a d d re s s a n d o f t e n d o n ’t 

translate into the critical or 

rational models of the public. 

Instead, counterpublics might be 

hostile or indecorous like punk or 

might participate in the invention 

of their own discourses like 

queer counterculture. 


developing multiple alternatives to the public 

Following Warner more than Fraser, [Farmer] is interested in poetic world 

making and what this might mean for composition pedagogy. The 

emphasis on making and text circulation draws him to punk, anarchist, and 

riot grrrl zines as archetypal genres produced through acts of bricolage […] 

he develops the concept of bricolage as an artful making do. Percy, he 

notes, sees resistance occurring, “not in the forum, the streets, or the 

public square, but rather in the ad hoc, ingenuous, and quotidian 

strategies that individuals deploy in everyday contexts” (30). 


Zines are a perfect example of this phenomenon […] Very much into DIY 

aesthetics, they had random typography, hand-drawn images, and 

photocopied and stapled pages. And sans any official distribution, they were 

handed out to friends, left in record stores, and traded through the postal 

service. They were a celebration of the amateurish, makeshift, and the 

ephemeral, and their collage aesthetics and anticopyright ethos, especially 

among anarchist zines, outlined an alternative way to live and a form of 

micropolitics—a power at the capillaries to articulate the system differently 

with “whatever tools of textual circulation are readily available. This 

alternative poetic world, in short, must be built from the street up” (50). 


This ethos of “put on a show and see who shows up” is exhibited in zine 

culture as well—make a zine, randomly circulate it, and see who is hailed by 

it and decides to show up for a gig, start their own band, or make their own 

zine […] Making zines in composition classes also gives students more 

rhetorical options than learning dominant argumentative or reasoned 

discourse. It gives them more rhetorical options in relation to the types 

of publics they may want or need to address and bring into being. It 

gives students an alternate vision of democratic discourse, a different sense 

of publicness, and a different form of citizenship grounded in making 

publics. 


Roman Graffiti from Pompeii, c. 70 B.C.E 

I'm amazed, oh wall, that you haven't fallen into ruins 

since you hold the boring scribbles of so many writers.

As I thought more about this scene, I began to 

hear echoes of my own relentless pedagogical 

question to students: What is this writing doing? 

I felt myself punctuated by those giant letters and 

excessive (punctuation) marks. It really got under 

my skin. 

Edbauer | (meta)Physical Graffiti | 132

Yet, what Trimbur’s model does not explicitly 

address, and what the ZEPPELIN example makes 

painfully clear, is that writing scenes are 

overwhelmingly populated by bodies: shocked, 

angry, delighted, and feeling-full bodies. 


Because the body-of-sensation is always 

stubbornly present in scenes of writing, there can 

be no affectless compositions. In order to more 

fully answer the question of what writing does, 

therefore, we need a model that takes affect’s 

operations into account. 


Using graffiti as an unruly exemplar, I read 

three familiar topoi—context, style, and signification 

—across scenes of graffiti in order to explore writing’s 

affective dimensions that are often neglected in 

composition […] More specifically, I argue that 

rhetoricity itself operates through an active 

mutuality between signification and affect. 


In short, we should consider the sensational 

experience of the body-in-context. Even before 

we have the opportunity to generate a discursive 

response to a situation, the body-in-context is 

first viscerally involved. 


S@OME# SPINOZA@ 

This primacy of affective involvement has perhaps been most thoroughly 

explained in the philosophy of Spinoza and his interest in the sensing body. 

Spinoza explicates something he calls the affections of the body, where “the 

body’s power of activity is increased or diminished, assisted or checked . . .” 

(104). For Spinoza, a body is never a/lone(ly) body, for one body is always in 

relation to another. “The human body can be affected in many ways by which its 

power of activity is increased or diminished," writes Spinoza (104). The relation of 

affect is not a one-way proposition. A body is affected by another body as much 

as it affects another body. His sensing body is a body-in-relation. 

Edbauer | (meta)Physical Graffiti | 141-42

You get down and immediately “lose yourself” in the 

music. Clichéd as it may be, this phrase bears out a 

kind of truth, for we do indeed lose our selves as 

delimited spaces. We lose our selves as an enclosedbordered 

subject. The music moves you, in spite of 

your wishes or desires. 


The sensation of such a relation, moreover, is what we might 

call the encounter of affect. It is the experience generated by 

relations—by your body-in-relation. We find that the 

rhetorical context that “calls” writing into being is always first 

a scene of affect’s experience. This is the primary cull to 

writing, which marks a relay between rhetorical context and 

the affective body. 


To create a strong ethos, therefore, the writer counts on an 

aggregate of sensation. The writer’s ability to create “impact” 

depends upon the feeling of too much or more than normal, or 

an experience of something got around. In other words, the 

writer depends on something else existing in proximity to 

signification and discursivity. Being spotted—getting up in as 

many different places as possible—is the only way to build 

ethos as a writer. 


Style is that which opens sites for making something 

matter to people—giving it a hook, a feel, a space to 

invest certain kinds of interest. Borrowing from 

Grossberg, we can argue that a “working” style is one 

that generates aggregate sensations of excess, all of 

which cull attention, interest, and affective investment. 


Sign|SY#MBOL 

hermeneutics|HE$URISTICS# 

Signification|ASIGNIF$ICATION@ 

representation|N$ONREPRE$SENTATI#ON

A writing’s impact may not have the same effect as its 

meaning effects. The two exist in proximity to one 

another in the space of rhetoric. Very much like a pun, or 

even the buffoonery and useless expenditure of two giant 

yellow words reading ZEPPELIN ROCKS!!!, writing is 

comprised of impacts that are at once intense and im/ 

palpable. 


structure 

Of Feeling 

R#AYMOND# W$ILLIAMS 

P$REFACE TO FILM ($1954)

Style is more than the genre, voice, and look of 

writing; it is also an aggregate of sensation. Style is 

an active and directive pulling—it draws various 

degrees of investment into particular sites. 


These are rhetoric’s domains of effects that 

construct the experience of daily life. The 

“practical” aspect of writing and rhetoric (for 

better or worse) is therefore nothing other than 

affect at work. 

Edbauer | (meta)Physical Graffiti | 154-55

ENGL 3860: Metaphysical Graffiti Slide Deck

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