Stickering may be limited as a means of changing minds, but its role in opening up physical space is underappreciated

“It’s just wasted paper”, my flatmate would say, as I slapped stickers on the signposts we walked by on our way to university. Our daily commute was littered with my debris, brightly coloured images bearing slogans like “Student Power”, “System Change not Climate Change”, and “Support your Local Antifa”. Despite the best efforts of the local government, no clean-up crew could match the daily deluge that came to adorn every pole, bin, and road sign en route.

At the time, all of this wasn’t so much directed political action as a simple habit. It wasn’t that I didn’t support the slogans, more that I was uncritical as to why it was so important that they be plastered across the city’s streets. Like the stereotypical “student wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt” I had seen the stickers of various left-wing parties across town, decided it seemed like a cool thing to do, and acquired a stack of my own. A year on this habit was nearing a fixation, with around 3,000 placed and no sign of slowing down.

Though they are relatively cheap and easy to design, stickers lack many of the features needed for effective messaging. An Instagram post or even a committed team with a stack of flyers could distribute more material in a day than I could in a year, potentially reaching a far larger audience. Moreover, a lack of room on the smaller, cheaper stickers means that they can only hold short slogans. Idealistic as I may be even I have little belief that seeing the words “Student Power” will have any impact on someone’s opinions, much less motivate them to act.

Yet there is more to politics than changing minds. One day I found myself walking to another side of town, an area I hadn’t visited often. But rather than a fresh canvas to decorate I found evidence of someone with a similar habit. Everywhere I looked was pock marked with colour: Dark blues, blacks, and whites. But this was not a friendly reunion. Peering in, I recognised the symbols of the Totenkopf and Celtic cross, and with every one I saw the more I felt that I was entering enemy territory. An image of myself and a few others decorating the city was tainted by the presence of another force.

I did not see a Totenkopf and realise that I was a Nazi. I did not see a Celtic cross and emerge a French Nationalist. But even if the message fell on deaf ears, I was not unaffected. What was abstract, the idea that this was contested space, became very real in a way that reading reports on Neo-Nazis groups in the area had not made it. Stickers don’t just send messages but rather claim spaces, creating an environment welcoming to one group or another. What in academic speak could be called “sociomaterial claims-making” can more clearly be seen through how one can feel during a protest, when the crowds take the streets in celebration, or anger. There is more meaning to protesting than what messages are displayed on banners, and the same goes for stickers too. Conquering space creates a sense of belonging in often deeply alienating urban areas: a corner of chaos and solidarity, an unpoliceable beacon in an otherwise ubiquitously surveyed land. Stickers are the protest of the everyday. A message of rebellion, illegally put, peeking through into normal life.

The everyday, street-side political activity of stickers has rarely been given a place within the most influential imaginaries of political action (with some exceptions). Crowds of protesters and institutional politics may change the world (for better or worse), but they are often fleeting and remote, profound in their separation from our everyday lives. The core of anarchist politics is the re-entrenching of politics within communities, the widening of politics from a mere spectacle of performative struggle to something embedded in the everyday. We can act on this through mutual aid, or community gardens, or unionism.

But if you don’t know where to start in taking back the world, there’s no harm in taking back your block. And who knows, maybe others will be emboldened to do the same.

~ Gabriel Fonten