I was struck by Fleming’s analysis of Elizabethan graffiti for the ways in which this form of graffiti subverts my understanding of graffiti as a form of “self-“expression. She argues that the projection of subjectivity and authorship upon the acting agents who inscribed Elizabethan graffiti is misinformed. Fleming writes that contemporary graffiti is “overdetermined as the medium of the socially disaffected […] 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” (Fleming 41).
In contrast, Fleming argues for an understanding of early modern English graffiti and wall writing that heeds the contemporaneous popular practices and understandings of writing. I appreciate the way in which Fleming exposes the aphoristic qualities of writing during these times by illuminating the relationship between the proverb and the posy. In the context of “parietal” graffiti, Fleming writes, of posies, that their “defining characteristic is to be written in such a way that its material embodiment forms an important part of its meaning. The posy, in short, is a saying or poem that is pointed by being written on something” (43). Thus, the act of, and art of, sgraffiato in Elizabethan England was about memory-making and “materializing thought” (44). A form of note-taking to assist in remembering, that takes material form, just as I am now doing on this blog?