Official Graffiti of the Everyday

Abstract

This article focuses attention on “official graffiti” or regulatory signs typified by highway signs and the most invasive and emblematic piece of official graffiti, the prohibition circle with its diagonal red slash used in the iconic representation No Smoking. Establishing the range and pervasiveness of official graffiti in everyday life (as prohibitions, warnings, advisories, instructions, etc.), the authors approach these visual manifestations from the standpoint of the sociology of governance and analyze them as important instances of government at a distance. They explore the varieties and forms of such regulation and trace their expansion from public space to quasi-public space and to the private realm. Locating the texts and icons of official graffiti within implied or express discursive frameworks, the authors point to the construction of objects and subjects of regulation and to regulatory agents as “absent experts” and address the key role of the construction of danger and the link to insurance principles in a “risk society.” They also examine resistance through actions of defacement and avoidance that result in the complex order and disorder of surfaces and spaces. Official graffiti manifests a distinctive form of hegemony that is exercised through the small, daily acts of everyday governance.