The Rhythm of the Cursive Line

Reframing graffiti, tagging, writing, cursive, and calligraphy

Abstract

This paper reconsiders the terms graffiti, tagging, writing, cursive, and calligraphy as more than neutral descriptors, arguing that their meanings are historically contingent and politically charged. Modern graffiti, frequently labeled with the externally imposed “G-word,” is better understood through the practitioners’ own term, stylewriting, a tradition grounded in the letterform and the embodied act of writing. Drawing on PHASE 2’s terminological interventions and Rammellzee’s Gothic Futurism, the analysis positions stylewriting as a practice that redefines legibility, authorship, and spatial belonging. Comparative etymology further reveals how both writing and graffiti originate in the material act of scratching or incising, suggesting that their divergence in modern discourse obscures their shared lineage.

The paper then turns to cursive, traditionally defined as a flowing, rapid form of script. Rather than privileging its efficiency, cursive exemplifies writing as rhythm, gesture, and relational presence. Stylewriting, in its emphasis on flow, repetition, and deliberate illegibility, may be productively reframed as a form of cursive writing that enacts resistance through opacity. Illegibility, often dismissed as failure, is here reconsidered as a strategy of autonomy against institutional and algorithmic regimes of readability.

To advance this rethinking, I introduce Interowriting, my theoretical and artistic framework that conceives writing not as representation but as becoming. In dialogue with Deleuze’s notion of the plane of immanence and contemporary accounts of interoception, Interowriting treats writing as an event of relation: a translation of bodily rhythms, affects, and intensities into marks that exceed the subject–object divide.