Fleming 2001

Fleming, Juliet. Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England. London: Reaktion Books, 2001.

"As far as I am concerned, a 'text' is a piece of writing that has been established as such for reasons that are themselves material, historical, and ideological. The notion of a 'text' represents the assumption that a certain form of consciousness has been able to dictate the terms of its own material constraints, and consequently remains, in some crucial sense, unbound. It is for this reason, of course, that the 'text' earns its privileged status as a register through which the mind may express itself freely. But my own project is engaged with the other end of the expressive spectrum, where matter appears to bind thought -- where, for example, an inscription may take the form of the implement on which it appears." (12-3)

Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie; how visual shapes affect poetic interpretations; line of poetry as "visual as well as an aural unit" for Puttenham and his contemporaries -- poems as "ocular representations" (18); "With Renaissance poetry, on the other hand, the eye is granted equal importance, and the visual dimensions of language ... are accorded an affective and cognitive consequence as familiar to Renaissance readers as it has since become strange" (19)

posy: "fully material, visual mode" of poetry "as it exists in its moment, at a particular site"; is portable "precisely because it has not achieved, and does not hope to achieve, the immaterial, abstracted status of the infinitely transmissible text" (20)

not Marxist materialism but more "traditional materialism that pits consciousness directly against matter" (21)

"To use this register is to return to an intellectual moment -- that of the English Renaissance -- which lacked a systematic bifurcation between real and thought objects, and consequently apprehended matter not as that which is deprived of meaning but as a principle of structure that underpins all meaning." (21)

Foucault 1970, Renaissance episteme in which words are things, bearing hidden signatures (23); "the reduction of the visible world to a two-dimensional writing surface" (24); "fundamental synesthesia" (25); no difference betwen painting and writing, writing on paper or on a way, body or axe, "no difference, finally, between writing and other visual patterns" (25)

Graffiti

no term for graffiti in early modern English, "a fact suggesting not so much that the vice was unknown, but that the activity was not distinguished from other writing practices, and not yet considered a vice" (33)

"graffiti is over-determined as the medium of the socially disaffected, for, within a culture that discounts matter as that which has no meaning, graffiti will always appear to be the mark of a human subjectivity that survives and protests its own radical dispossession." (41)

"Operating on a natural world divinely marked for human notice, and dealing with truths it understands to be already extant, early modern writing is readily perceived by its practitioners as tending towards non-subjectivity -- that is, towards a writing that requires no subjective position of enunciation." (41)

"the Elizabethans understood reading and writing differently, as procedures for the gathering, storage and redeployment of well-framed wisdom. Within suc ha regimen, writing is that which frames truth to catch the eye or memory: like the stylistic devices of brevity or ornament, writing can, in and of itself, add weight to a sentence. While the advent of print technology (like the invention of the phonetic alphabet) is usually understood to be coterminous with, if not identical to, an increase in intellectual and technological abstraction, to the early modern English it may rather have represented a mode of materializing thought more densely." (44)

"Elizabethan writing embraced its status as a material thing" (46)

commonplace books; "as likely to have been read off, as written on to, windows and walls" (48)

whitewashed domestic as "the primary scene of writing in early modern England" (50)

wall-painting as calligraphic (61)

Luther imagined painting the whole Bible on inside/outside of houses "so that all can see it" (65)

Whitewash

Freud, "Note upon the Mystic Writing Pad" (1924); Derrida's reading of it

Protestants blotting the name of the Poper from the page "is to produce a blot as that name"

"writing can be permanently retained, or regularly erased -- but not on the same surface" (76)

• "the whitewashed wall is a writing apparatus not entirely governed by the tension between these two functions" (76)