The Public Sphere and "Gangs and Their Walls"

In Cintron's piece "Gangs and Their Walls," he draws attention to the ways in which the identification and differentiation methods deployed by street gangs depended upon the material products and cultural content of mainstream society. Specifically, Cintron notes that street gangs would, in an effort to mark themselves as members of their own gangs, amass and wear items of clothing whose mainstream "meanings" served an alternate purpose. Thus, a member of a gang whose colors are black and gold might wear a sports jersey from a well-known professional team whose colors are also black and gold. His intent seems to be to point out how the street gangs appropriation of mainstream cultural material for their own particular purposes parallels their very raison d'etre, which is to create a situation (a society) that allows for them to acquire the respect denied them from mainstream society. Although Cintron does not phrase it in this way, but this is very close to the Hegelian notion of determinate negation. Street gangs, in their attempt to break from mainstream society, are nevertheless inextricably tied to it by that very negation; they are determined not to be part of a specific other society and all their efforts are accordingly still oriented towards that which they seek to break from. Not only in the clothing choices of street gangs was this apparent, but even in the grammatical conventions of their graffiti, which Cintron says, "suggests that convention in signaling respect was the baseline on which a transgressive order was manufactured" (169). Cintron ties this observation to Habermas' notion of the public sphere, but then remarks that the model provided by Habermas is not without its difficulties. Turning to Stanley Aronowitz, Cintron draws attention to the fact that "because Habermas' model is dependent on rationality as a "presupposition of public communication," the public sphere is understood as a "restricted space" rather than a participatory one" (174). The general idea is that this is supposed to line up with the efforts of the street gangs, who have been "restricted" from mainstream society, yet continue to orient themselves toward it in their actions. However, the suggestion that the public sphere excludes street gangs on the basis of their lack of rationality strikes me as patently false. As Cintron himself notes, the methods employed by the street gangs are numerous and subtly intelligent. In other words, they manifest rationality. This entails that Cintron has either misunderstood or misapplied Habermas' theory (although perhaps Aronowitz is partly to blame?). Street gangs might exist on the fringes of mainstream society, and they might even be excluded from the public sphere, but if they are, it wouldn't be due to their non-possession of rationality.