‘Defacement’ refers to the (violent) direction of surfaces and was the subject of a critical examination of racist police violence by New York artists in the 1980s. It is taken as the starting point of this contribution, because in it I clearly show the three dimensions that theoretically come into view: optimization, subject formation, and recognition. Against the background of these concepts, this article asks how they are inscribed in schools and how differentiations are thereby produced. The starting point is a double ambivalence of recognition in the field of disregard, recognition, and subjectivization. They provide a space of possibility in which school cultures unfold their optimization strategies, but in which subjectivizations are also hinted at – for example, through differentiation strategies such as institutional racism. Against this background, two school culture designs are unfolded on the basis of interviews with school principals. One school is a reform pedagogical private school that belongs to the elitist educational segment, the other school is a secondary school located in a marginalized part of the city. Finally, again against the backdrop of ‘defacement’, we ask about the structural features that unfold in confrontation with recognition and optimization.