Writing the Wall, Righting the World. Exploring the Dionysian Dimensions of Wall Graffiti from the Agora to Facebook

Abstract

The turn of the current century has witnessed the re-negotiation of materiality and the growing ascendancy of the virtual, the immaterial over the real or tangible. Though it would be presumptuous to claim that the virtual has totally assumed control over the real, it can be asserted that the figure of the wall as a transfusion between the real/virtual and the self/other has emerged between the two. Based on constructions of textuality articulated by theorists such as Roland Barthes and Friedrich Nietzsche, and a pastiche format that mimics the functionality of the wall of scription, this article brings together multiple enactments of mural scriptions that include the concrete, textual, textile, vegetative and the virtual in order to articulate the Dionysian property of wall-effects. It traces successive actualisations of the wall, analysing how the virtual Facebook wall assimilates and re-dynamizes the traits of the tangible walls through an array of intertextual/inter-medial modalities.