Language is material. If psychoanalysis teaches us anything, it’s this. The psychological realism of analysis.
Los Angelenos are so inundated by material language that its removal is a line item on the city’s annual budget. ~ $30,000,000 was budgeted in the 2022-2023 fiscal year to the Board of Public Works, which manages the Department of Public Works (DPW), and lists “graffiti removal [sic]” as one of its primary functions.
But, funds apportioned for similar purposes can be found throughout the budget. $330,000 was allotted within the Street Lighting Maintenance Assessment Fund for graffiti removal; Pacific Graffiti Solutions — an LA City Council Community Project, listed in the veritable no man’s land of the Nondepartmental Footnotes — was awarded $25,000 (it’s worth mentioning here the anachronistically titled Report No. 1, dated 10/9/2020, from the Office of Community Beautification (OCB), a subsidiary of the DPW, which lists a “ceiling” to that awarded amount as $2,000,000); Graffiti Abatement Strike Teams had $1,670,000 set aside for similar purposes within the Unappropriated Balance. In total, the OCB requested $46,500,000 in funding for graffiti removal contracts for the period of July 2020 through June 2023, outlined in a different Report No. 1, this one dated 2 months prior.
The LA body politic exerts a considerable effort toward the removal [sic] of graffiti. This is a misnomer of course, as painting over something does not remove what is underneath. Erasure leaves its mark in absentia: the repressed and its inevitable return.
What is writing if language is material? Freud draws a helpful analogy between the psychic and the physical in A Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad.’ He writes:
To make use of the Mystic Pad, one writes upon the celluloid portion of the covering-sheet which rests on the wax slab. . . On the Mystic Pad the writing vanishes every time the close contact is broken between the paper which receives the stimulus and the wax slab which preserves the impression. . . It is as though the unconscious stretches out feelers. . . towards the external world and hastily withdraws them as soon as they have sampled the excitations coming from it.
Haste is also a key metric for the DPW. The OCB lists the estimated “Percent of Graffiti Removal Requests Completed in 24 hours” as 75% for 2022 (a 2% increase over the previous year’s metric). Furthermore, the OCB boasts a whopping 85% of removal requests as being completed within 48 hours. The (second) Report No. 1 also offers more insight into this matter under the “Specialty Services” and “Strike Force Services” headings:
I spoke to several employees of the DPW to get a better sense of language’s materiality and their roles as emissaries of repression, as feelers of the unconscious being sent out within the metropolitan psyche.
PH: What did that say before you painted over it?
Mr. A: I don’t know. I can’t read this shit, I don’t think it’s really meant to be read.
PH: What’s it for then?
A: Just to be seen, just to say they were here.
PH: Who are they?
A: Some dipshit kids, or gangs I guess.
PH: Depends on what they write?
A: Yeah.
PH: Who writes what?
A: Kids’ll draw dicks or “Fuck so-and-so” and stuff like that, but gangs have specific tags they use.
PH: What’s the worst thing you’ve ever had to remove?
A: [laughs] I’m not sure. . .
PH: Well, I guess you don’t really remove it, just paint over it. . .
PH: That’s pretty big, how long did it take?
Mr. B: This whole wall probably took me 30 minutes, starting over there and ending here. Or did you mean the tag?
PH: I assume the tag took a lot longer, all the colors and what not.
B: Yeah, but they gotta do it quick so no one sees them.
PH: Do you ever see a tag that you wish you didn’t have to paint over?
B: Doesn’t matter, there’ll be another one thrown up in no time.
PH: I can kinda read that through the paint, huh?
Mr. C: Yeah, I’ll hit it again once it dries. I don’t have a darker color on me. I don’t want to walk all the way back to the truck just to get one.
PH: Does it matter if the paint doesn’t match the wall, doesn’t that sort of stand out too?
C: I don’t think it matters that much, it’s cleaner. Better than having whatever that said on it.
PH: What did that say . . . is that a ‘P’?
C: [puts paint roller where I was gesturing] Don’t know, and after this coat no one’ll be able to tell.
References
Freud, S. (1925) A Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing-Pad’. In A. Freud (Ed.), J. Strachey (Trans.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. (1923- 1925) (Vol. XIX, pp. 226–232). Hogarth Press.
Los Angeles City Council. (2022) Budget for the Fiscal Year: Beginning July 1, 2022, Ending June 30, 2023. https://lacontroller.org/budgets/2022-2023/
Department of Public Works. (2020) Report No. 1: Request to Execute Graffiti Removal Contracts for the Period of July 2020 through June 2023. https://cityclerk.lacity.org/councilagenda/AttachmentViewer.ashx?AttachmentID=11118 0&ItemID=110272
Department of Public Works. (2020) Report No. 1: Request to Execute Strike Force and Specialty Graffiti Removal Contracts for the Period of July 2020 through June 2023. https://cityclerk.lacity.org/CouncilAgenda/AttachmentViewer.ashx?AttachmentID=1143 77&ItemID=113003