In my recent writing about graffiti I’ve come up against a discrepancy between how I think about graffiti and how graffiti writers think about it. The thing is, how could I possibly be right? After all, I only photograph graffiti; they’re the ones who actually make it. Don’t they know what they’re doing?
Well, yes and no.
It’s one thing to do something, another thing to be able to step back from the doing and reflect on it, as though it were somewhere ‘out there’ where it can be easily observed, analyzed, and described. I’ll get to the graffiti case later, but right now I want to think about this as a general phenomenon, that we often don’t know what we’re doing.
This is an issue I think about a lot, and in many contexts, for it pervades human behavior, both individual and a social. We don’t KNOW how we do what we do; nonetheless, we manage to DO IT.
In thinking about this, I find one particular example very useful. I call on it time and again, turning it over and over in my mind like a worry stone. I used it in a recent post, Two Puzzles Concerning the Self. It’s an experiment Jean Piaget conducted in the early 1970s, which I’ll repeat from that earlier post, more or less (note that that version, in turn, was extracted from a long and formal academic article about the self).
How do you crawl?
In this experiment children were asked to crawl for about 10 meters and then to describe what they had just done (Piaget, The Grasp of Consciousness 1976, pp. 1 ff.). Four-year olds generally said either that 1) they first moved one arm, then the other, then one leg, then the other, or 2) legs first and then arms. Piaget called this a Z pattern. That is not, in fact, how any of them actually crawled.
What they actually did was either to first move one arm, then the opposite leg, then the other arm, then the opposite leg, or the same pattern beginning with a leg. Piaget called this an X pattern. It isn't until children are seven or older that they can describe this X pattern.
What is striking is that the younger children's verbal account of such a basic act is that is simply wrong. How could that be? How could the child not know how it does such a simple and basic action? The answer, obviously, is that making a verbal description of some physical act IS DIFFERENT FROM actually performing that act.
In order to execute the crawl there must be some cortical tissue devoted to schemas regulating the appropriate actions. Crawling isn't a spinal reflex; it cannot be done without cortical participation. But those regulating schemas must in some way be distinct from the schemas underlying the younger children's verbal accounts, otherwise those accounts would be more accurate.
Note that children learn to crawl before they learn to speak. Language competence is in no way necessary for crawling. It is, at best, secondary to it.
We are here dealing with two different neural representations for the same action. And they are radically different. The one actually regulating crawling his highly detailed, but also essentially private. The child is the only one who can actually direct her muscles to move.
The linguistic representation is not at all detailed, either in the incorrect Z-form or the more accurate X-form. Each description is crude, but the X-form description is just slightly less crude. Moreover, these representations are social; they are based on a shared linguistic code, not on the child’s private experience of its own body.
With this in mind, let’s return to the graffiti case.
Graffiti and Beyond
The problem graffiti writers face is that existing concepts and vocabulary is biased against the phenomenon. Yes, graffiti culture does have it’s own terms of art—tag, throwie, piece, burner, cloud, shine, stickers, rollers, get up, buff, and so on—but those terms were coined in the general cultural context of ‘standard-issue’ thinking about art. That standard-issue is about individual artists, which is of paramount importance to graffiti writers who, after all, are writing their names, and individual works, which are not so important as they tend to be ephemeral.
And there’s the problem, the individual works. In the ‘legit’ art world, individual works are relatively small—at least in relation to the side of a subway car or a 20-foot stretch of building wall—and portable. The artist paints a work in a studio, exhibits it in gallery, where a patron sees it, purchases it, and then exhibits it in the entranceway to his penthouse apartment. The context is irrelevant to such a portable work. And so standard-issue thinking pays relatively little attention to context.
Graffiti, of course, is different. The work is inseparable from its context. Even a moving subway car, or freight car, or truck body, is a context; it is something more than and beyond the surface on which the graffiti is painted.
So, when graffiti writers photograph their work, they, in effect, treat it as though it were a free-moving painting on a canvas. It’s just that this canvas happens to be exceptionally large, and it’s fixed to the wall. Such photographs are always head-on, and quite frequently the context is cropped out.
But not only graffiti writers. Just about everyone who photographs graffiti, photographs it in this way. Context will be cropped away. Not only that, it is rare to see detail shots, and almost unheard of to see shots taken so close that you can see the grain of cinderblock, brick, concrete, wood, etc. on which the graffiti has been painted.
And so forth.
But enough about graffiti, it’s only one example. There are thousands upon thousands of examples. Take language itself. When linguists study syntax, they hypothesize rules and processes that are not conscious. We talk and listen, but don’t know how we do it. We just do it.
And feelings, what of them? Sometime in my middle or late teens I read a Dear Abby column where a girl was seeking advice on love. She’d met a boy, fallen madly in love, but was it “true love” she wanted to know. Abby’s reply was useless, you’ll know true love when you feel it, something like that, but not those words.
Yeah, right.
But what could she have said? Heck, what’s TRUE love? Our inner life IS us, but it’s mysterious even to ourselves. We can’t step out of our heads and bodies and examine our inner states as though they were insects pinned to a specimen tray. We have our desires and feelings, we follow them and are driven by them, but do we KNOW what they are? Not really.
And so it goes. My friends in the software business tell me the same thing is true about work. They’re hired to build a piece of software that helps workers do their jobs. But those very workers can’t tell the software designers how, step-by-pesky-step, they do their jobs. Figuring out, exactly what the job consists of, step-by-pesky-step, that’s half the design problem right there. And it’s rarely done well.
And so it goes. These four cases, graffiti, language, feelings, work tasks, are difficult to think about. Piaget’s craw, that’s much simpler. But only because we don’t look too deeply.
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