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CHAPTER 1
Making Space in Lansing, Michigan
Communities and/in Circulation
Donnie Johnson Sackey, Jim Ridolfo, and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss
If you've ever walked down the street, seen a name, and wondered what that marking meant, I'll tell you: It means somebody is telling you a story about who they are and what they are prepared to do to make you aware of it.
— Stephen Powers, The Art of Getting Over: Graffiti at the Millennium (1999)
Rhetorical velocity requires an attention to circulation — a conscious rhetorical concern for distance, travel, speed, time, and space. In this chapter, we strategically relationize rhetorical velocity, delivery, and circulation (Ridolfo 2005; Ridolfo and DeVoss 2009; Ridolfo and Rife 2011). Specifically, we explore the ways in which an act of civic disobedience circulated and contributed to the assembly and cocreation of a particular community space. Although previous work on rhetorical velocity has theorized how rhetoricians strategize or analyze how and why texts become other texts, we theorize the telos of cascading acts of delivery, distribution, and circulation as a means to a specific rhetorical goal. We examine how the active circulation of texts across multiple kinds of space enables and supports a physical community bound to a specific time and space. In doing so, we attend to the material and tactile aspects of the writing act, the physical production it inspired and encouraged, and the various implications that resulted.
We first revisit, resituate, and extend the notion of rhetorical velocity and discuss its relationship to delivery and circulation through the lens of cultural mobility studies. Next we introduce a specific case study we can read through rhetorical velocity, delivery, mobilization, and circulation: a moment of civic disobedience in Lansing, Michigan. We situate graffiti as rhetorical action anchored by velocity and circulation by addressing an instance of tagging that frames graffiti art as a rhetorical tactic and community catalyst. We conclude by considering not only the reception and recomposition of texts but how the circulation and motion of texts leave impressions in and around places and spaces.
CIRCULATION, MOBILITY, AND MOBILIZATION
As Laurie E. Gries makes evident in the introduction to this collection, scholars in and beyond rhetoric and composition have robustly attended to the study of circulation. Much of the work that the editors and scholars in this collection draw upon is characterized by the velocity of circulation — that is, the rapidity with which information can flow. Jim Ridolfo and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss introduced the concept of rhetorical velocity as "a strategic approach to composing for rhetorical delivery" (Ridolfo and DeVoss 2009). "It is both," they explain, "a way of considering delivery as a rhetorical mode, aligned with an understanding of how texts work as a component of a strategy ... [and] requires on the part of rhetors a careful consideration of the future time (and particular moments) and place(s) of where, how, and potentially into what texts may be recomposed — and what this may mean." Ridolfo and Martine Courant Rife expanded on rhetorical velocity to consider how copyright may either facilitate or — more likely — disrupt a rhetor's ability to circulate information (Ridolfo and Rife 2011). Here we apply rhetorical circulation and rhetorical velocity to understand a particular moment situated across time, geography, and culture. Circulation studies provides a framework from which we can understand the delivery of rhetorical acts as a moving, breathing thing — not just a one-way transmission. Rhetorical velocity helps us to understand the ways in which and the speed with which communicative acts travel. Cultural mobility helps to frame circulation across and within spaces.
Kevin Hannam, Mimi Sheller, and John Urry define mobility studies as "encompass[ing] both the large-scale movements of people, objects, capital and information across the world, as well as the more local processes of daily transportation, movement through public space and the travel of material things within everyday life" (Hannam, Sheller, and Urry 2006, 1). Mobility studies helps make visible existing networks of people, spaces, and things as they are connected and disconnected by daily spatial, cultural flows. Perhaps the strongest articulation of the principles and objects of study for cultural mobility studies was presented in Stephen Greenblatt's (2009) contribution to his edited collection, Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto. His manifesto frames cultural mobility as such: First, cultural mobility must be situated as a literal, physical thing related to the "physical, infrastructural, and institutional conditions of movement" (250). (Think, for instance, where the sidewalks are on a college campus. These are fixed and in some ways control our movement across space). Second, cultural mobility studies must attend to both the obvious and the opaque movements of "peoples, objects, images, texts, and ideas" (250). Third, cultural mobility studies should explore "contact zones," certainly a metaphor composition studies scholars are familiar with (à la Mary Louise Pratt). Fourth, cultural mobility studies must "account in new ways for the tension between individual agency and structural constraint" (251). Greenblatt urges scholars that such studies cannot be theoretical and abstract but must be anchored within systems of power and understood through how individuals perceive agency. Fifth, and of particular import to this chapter, Greenblatt argues that mobility studies should "analyze the sensation of rootedness" (252). He argues that mobilities can only be understood within the larger contexts of fixity. That is, what seems bounded and static requires as much attention as things that circulate and change (see also Hannam, Sheller, and Urry 2006).
Benjamin Fraser and Steven D. Spalding brought cultural mobility studies to graffiti by moving away from traditional notions of graffiti as static text and addressing its strategic placement on public transportation infrastructures (e.g., trains); they specifically explored the ephemeral conditions of identity, meaning, and participation as graffiti travels through space (Fraser and Spalding 2012). Train graffiti reappropriates space: its designers, much like other graffiti designers, work against the intended designs of urban planning, particularly the commercialization of space. As graffiti-adorned trains move through space, they disrupt urban planners' intended experiences. Consider, for example, how spaces designed primarily for tourists are immediately transformed and how different spatial experiences are produced when graffiti-adorned trains move through that space. This is literally ephemeral space making by way of circulation.
Despite the relatively new emergence of mobility studies as a discipline, we feel that it has much to offer writing studies scholars, as its focus on material movement augments our own theories of circulation. Mobility studies, specifically, provides us with a backdrop to better understand the complex relational web within which rhetorical acts are made and across which they circulate. Here we situate graffiti not as a criminal act, nor an individual act of expression, but as an important civic act that emerges, circulates, and contributes to the assembly and cocreation of a particular community space. Circulation studies helps us to understand the how; mobility studies helps us to anchor the where.
Susan Stewart (1991), writing from an English studies perspective, reconciles graffiti as crime and art that "signif[ies] interruption of the boundaries of public and private space" and "makes claims upon materiality ... by emphasiz[ing] the free commercial quality of urban spaces in general, a quality in contrast to the actual paucity of available private space" (217). Mark Halsey and Alison Young, on the other hand, describe graffiti writing as "an affective process that does things to writers' bodies (and the bodies of onlookers) as much as to the bodies of metal, concrete and plastic, which typically compose the surfaces of urban worlds" (Halsey and Young 2006, 276; emphasis in original). In the discussion that follows, we describe graffiti as a circulatory process of public writing that can revise place and engender the vital connections necessary for building healthy, thriving communities. We focus less on the process of graffiti production as an individual composer writing to the world with paint and more as the rich tapestry of context and culture in which graffiti emerges and circulates. We are particularly interested in how graffiti circulates and contributes to the assembly and cocreation of a particular community space. In doing so, we attend to the material and tactile aspects of the act, the physical production it inspired and encouraged, and the various implications that resulted.
MAKING SPACE IN LANSING, MICHIGAN
To anchor our case, we start our study in Lansing, Michigan. But we travel first to Detroit. Lansing is about ninety minutes west of Detroit, a city that has experienced a range of public and street art projects, including the well-known Heidelberg Project, where much of a city block has been in transformation since 1986 — the exterior walls, windows, and porches covered in art. The Obstruction of Justice House, for instance, is covered by painted signs; some are clearly descriptive (e.g., political signs), others are more connotative (e.g., a stop sign, paintings of shoes, objects tagged "PD"). The house was initially meant, in the 1990s, to symbolize the complex and multifaceted struggles within the city of Detroit. At that time and into the 2000s, the house became home to messages about happenings across the United States. Over the years, some of the houses — the Obstruction of Justice House included — have been the target of arson. In September 2013, more than two-thirds of the Obstruction of Justice House burned to the ground.
Beyond Heidelberg, Detroit has attracted a lot of attention over the past few years, in part due to political scandals, in part due to its bankruptcy, and in part for its "ruin porn" aspects — the draw of the beauty of urban decay. And there is something beautiful and haunting about much of Detroit's landscape. No one who has seen the abandoned Michigan Central Station railroad depot walks away without being touched by its enormity and the sad majesty in its eighteen stories of crumbling walls and broken windows. The Detroit Free Press, or Freep, has described "Detroit's unique profile as a kind of laboratory of extreme urban dilapidation and nascent revitalization" (Stryker 2010). This laboratory, in 2010, attracted international graffiti/street artist Banksy, who hit the grounds of the city's partially abandoned Packard Automotive Plant. This plant is one of about eighty thousand abandoned residential and commercial buildings within Detroit's city limits (AlHajal 2014) and takes up more than 3.5 million square feet on forty acres. We say "partially abandoned" because one company still lists the plant as its address, and one urban squatter/caretaker — Allan Hill — lives within the wreckage and decay of the once-thriving facility (see Anthony Bourdain [2013] Parts Unknown Detroit for a conversation with Hill). We also say "partially abandoned" because the plant is a hot spot for photographers and urban explorers.
Banksy hit the Packard Plant in 2010. Within a few days of people realizing that Banksy left his mark, a for-profit gallery/grassroots group excavated all 1,500 pounds of his work — a large cement block on which he painted a portrait of a young child holding a can of red paint and looking imploringly, with perhaps a bit of dismay and resistance, at the viewer. Indicated by a red- stained paintbrush in his/her hand, the child's recently painted sign reads: "I remember when all this was trees." The group moved Banksy's work to their gallery space located near the foot of the Ambassador Bridge, which connects Detroit and Windsor, Canada. After their removal of Banksy's graffiti work was discovered, the group put it into storage at an undisclosed location. (This concealment is interesting given that graffiti is typically anchored to its space and moment and its public-ness.) So the piece sat, somewhere in Detroit, hidden and inaccessible, its circulation halted.
The gallery was soon sued by the owners of some of the Packard facility acreage, who argued that the art was theirs and worth at least $100,000. The parties wound up settling; the gallery paid $2,500 for the art piece, and it was put back on display in 2012 ("Banksy Battle" 2010; Wetherbe 2012). In responding to people purchasing his work in the past, Banksy has remarked, "I can't believe you morons actually buy this shit" (Banksy's personal website, 2007). He also has commented that "graffiti isn't meant to last forever" (Northover 2010). His work has an ephemeral, kairotic moment and place in space as defined by the medium of graffiti, the forces of weather, and the walls themselves.
We share this example because, in this case, rhetorical velocity was brought to Banksy's work; Banksy clearly anchored meaning to space and did not design the piece with motion or permanence in mind. Yet the removal of the piece from its space of creation and the ways in which it was circulated changed the economic, cultural, and political shape of the piece. It is also a generative story of fame, art, civic disobedience, rhetoric, space, place, and time, and, most importantly, it is for us economically, culturally, and geographically entrenched in the lived experience of Detroit. But it's not the story we want to tell here. For that story — a story of graffiti that was purposefully circulated — we will go ninety miles down the road to Lansing and consider another moment in time.
Lansing is Michigan's capital, and as the former hometown of Oldsmobile, it was once a vibrant center for Michigan's automobile industry. The namesake of General Motors, Ransom Eli Olds, is buried in Lansing. His presence is still felt; Olds Freeway runs through town. Yet traces of his legacy are indeed being erased. Lansing's minor league baseball team used to play in Oldsmobile Park, for instance; in 2010 the stadium was renamed the Cooley Law School Stadium.
The area of Lansing in which our story takes place is named REO Town — one of Lansing's many small, distinct geographic pockets, most of which are identifiable as neighborhoods. For decades at the north end of REO Town sat the Deluxe Inn. The Deluxe Inn was located specifically at the intersection of the Olds Freeway (I-496) and Washington Avenue, approximately five blocks from the state capitol building. As such, the inn served as a geographic and visual entry from the capitol area into REO Town, which housed an Oldsmobile plant until the 1970s and now houses a 2.5 million-square-foot General Motors facility on 111 acres that runs a two-shift operation and produces the Cadillac CTS and ATS. The acreage of the current plant, which runs along the Grand River, is almost three times the size of the now-abandoned Packard Plant in Detroit. Many of the buildings on the property have been destroyed, and the lots on which they sat are largely cleared and emptied. The entire west side of the plant is, essentially, a parking lot. Sometimes it's used to store cars post-assembly, before they are trucked out. Other times the over half-mile expanse of the lot sits empty.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Circulation, Writing, and Rhetoric"
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