EXCERPT The Grain of the Walls Prisons or ramparts, those where graffiti covers every surface or those where it is prohibited, walls are the stakes, not just of freedom, but of writing and of thought. From the first royal legislations to contemporary tags, by way of prisoners of all eras, walls have been the great support of political writing. Tables or columns, bark or papyrus, Rosetta Stone or New York concrete, temples, artists’ studios or urban walls, these are the conditions of the empirical existence of thought and literature, of their multiple birth. One of the discoveries of the twentieth century—a theoretical discovery—is that literature is not written necessarily extra- or intra-muros but apud muros—on an infinite wall, even, at once angular and straight; a wall that is fractalized, and not only in the topological sense. Every artist, fractalist or not, is something of a protolegislator and last creator, who intends to leave a testament. To the most well-known fractal objects—the sea, its waves, its storms, its turbulence, its ‘Brittany coasts’, we must now add walls: in their ruined, cracked, shabby, angular aspect—new mural and lapidary possibilities, a ‘genetic’ grain. Here also thought can be written, ‘fractal’ thought, and not only that of painting; phonemes, and not only pictemes. There is not only a becoming-graffiti or a becoming-tag of walls, nor even a becoming-wall or -tag of writing, but a fractal experience of thought as a function of the grain of the support…