  Goffmania |
Thursday, August 01, 2002
What Aerosols!: Will the Graffiti Fans at the New York Times Ever Grow Up?
Heather MacDonald Heather MacDonald is the most forceful of City Journal's polemicists. I really hate reading her, because she forces me to wonder if I'm totally wrong about everything. This time she's talking about graffiti. She connects the elevation of graffiti from crime to art to a broader "romanticization of lawlessness" nurtured almost entirely by distanced, bored, white, guilty liberals. I suppose that she hasn't really caused me to rethink anything, if I can just remember that the moral question about graffiti is undecidable, and that all that can be fruitfully said is that graffiti is immoral to Heather MacDonald as well as a form of expression to others. That it makes real the tension between order and chaos that exists in the imaginations of both shopkeepers (aligned with order) and taggers (aligned with chaos.) God, it's so hard to sort. |  |
RECENT MUST-READS: To Our Readers film prof Ray Carney plushie/furry subculture - - - - - Goffmania is a weblog dedicated to the influential American social psychologist Erving Goffman. Who's responsible? Neel is a college student in eastern Pennsylvania. Jason is a writer in the Midwest. Sue has driven a school bus in Wisconsin for 34 years. Goffman links: Excerpts from The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life Article: Celebrating Erving Goffman - - - - - Goffman Biography A sociologist well-known for his analyses of human interaction, Erving Goffman relied less on formal scientific method than on observation to explain contemporary life. He wrote on subjects ranging from the way people behave in public to the different "forms" of talk, and always from the point of view that every facet of human behavior is "significant in the strategy and tactics of social struggle, " a Times Literary Supplement critic says. Roy Harris, in another Times Literary Supplement review, calls Goffman "a public private-eye. . . forever on the lookout for candid-camera evidence which might lead to divorce proceedings between ourselves and our social images." NEEL'S DAILY: Follow Me Here Arts & Letters Daily wood s lot simcoe JASON'S DAILY: Slate Romenesko McSweeney's Pitchfork SUE'S DAILY: Gotham Gazette Tom Tomorrow Media Whores Online |
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