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Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School

2011 A Portrait of the Activist as a Yes Man: Examining and Its Actors Through the Circuit of Culture Derrick Shannon

Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more , please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF COMMUNICATION AND INFORMATION

A PORTRAIT OF THE ACTIVIST AS A YES MAN:

EXAMINING CULTURE JAMMING AND ITS ACTORS THROUGH THE

CIRCUIT OF CULTURE

By

DERRICK SHANNON

A Thesis submitted to the School of Communication and Information in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science

Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2011

The members of the Committee approve the thesis of Derrick Shannon on April 01, 2011.

______Andrew Opel Professor Directing Thesis ______Donna Marie Nudd Committee Member ______Jennifer Proffitt Committee Member

Approved: ______Steve McDowell, Chair, Department of Communication ______Larry Dennis, Dean, College of Communication

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above named committee members.

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For Dad

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author would like to primarily thank Dr. Andy Opel, Dr. Bill Lawson, and my father Sam Shannon for supporting me through this project, and for pushing me to finish. Without their encouragement and generosity I would not have been able to see this to an end. I would also like to thank Dr. Nudd and Dr. Proffitt for taking part in this and lending their time. Finally, I would like to thank my mother, Ginger Shannon, who is the kindest most inspiring person I know.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSRACT…………………………………………………………………………….………….vi 1. CHAPTER ONE: INRODUCTION…………………………………………………...……...1 2. CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW……………………………………..….…….....7 THE THOERY BEHIND JAMMING THE SPECTACLE 2.0…………………...………7 THE SPECTACLE 2.1……………………………………………………………..……..8 CULTURE JAMMING AGAINST THE SPECTACLE 2.20 …………………….….....11 BILLY & JOEY 2.21 ………………………………..……………………………….….14 2.22………………………………………………….………………....15 MOVING ON……………………………………………………………………...….…18 3. CHAPTER THREE: ………………………………...……………….….19 4. CHAPTER FOUR: REPRESENTATION………………………………………...…….…...24 INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………....….24 A BRIEF ADDENDUM TO METHODOLOGY…………………………………....…..27 THE YES MEN GET FRAMED…………………………………………………...…....28 WHO FRAMED THE YES MEN?....…………………………………………..…….....30 5. CHAPTER FIVE: IDENTITY………………………………………………………...….….34 INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………...….….34 CRYSTALLIZING THE METHOD……………………………………………..…..….36 ‗WHAT‘S HE BUILDING IN THERE?‘………………………………………...….…..37 ‗I AM HE AS YOU ARE HE‘…………………………………………………………...40 6. CHAPTER SIX: PRODUCTION……………………………………………………………48 THE PROJECT……………………………………………………………….………….48 GLOBALIZATION…………………………………………………………..…….……50 THE YES MEN AS ARTICULATING ANTAGONISTS…………..………..………...53 IMAGE EVENTS………………………………………………………………………..55 COUNTER-CULTURAL INTERMEDIARIES………………………………………...58 7. CHAPTER SEVEN: CONCLUSION…………………………………………………….....61 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………………...... 65 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH…………………………………………………………………….69

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ABSTRACT

The focus of this thesis is to provide a critical examination of the movement of culture jamming through a primary reading of activist group The Yes Men. The Yes Men as the primary focus, and the movement of culture jamming as the theoretical backdrop will be examined through the ‗Circuit of Culture‘ in a of cultural studies. The goal is not to judge success or failure of a group or a movement, but rather to place these particular entities in the context of the culture in which they exist.

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CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

On 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell as western liberal triumphed over . To some this signified the end of the great ideological struggle of the age, and thus ―the end of history‖ (Fukuyama, 1992). Those who accepted this view signed on to Francis Fukuyama‘s declaration, in The End of History and the Last Man, that ―liberal democracy may constitute the end point of mankind‘s ideological evolution,‖ and the ―final form of human , and as such constituted the end of history‖ (ibid, xi). Fukuyama, a former U.S. State Department official, was not saying that were perfect, they had flaws and social injustices, but the flaws existed because the twin principles of and equality, on which modern democracy is founded, had yet to be implemented successfully. A was cultivated that felt that ―while some present-day countries might fail to achieve stable liberal democracy, and others might lapse back into other, more primitive forms of rule like theocracy or military dictatorship, the ideal of liberal democracy could not be improved on‖ (ibid.). These arguments have become a cornerstone of logic for , , and groups that hold enormous power and resources and are satisfied with a dominated by neoliberal and corporate principles. This view, mainly held by the political right, that there was only one way of , assumed that democracy and were not only a destination but also a goal. Yet, they ignored the dangers of ideological myopia.

Alternatively, not everyone believed in the ―end of history‖ conclusion. Also in 1989, , a former executive, experienced the restrictions inherent in the system when he tried to buy airtime for a thirty-second spot countering ‘s forest industry by condemning the destruction of old-growth forests in the . Lasn felt that the ―industry was blatantly lying‖ (p.30), and abusing the forests to excess, accusing it of holding the view that ―a tree is just an unemployed log‖ (ibid.). His message was refused by every station he approached because it strayed outside the agenda and threatened corporate sponsorship along with the good nature of a market-based system. Running head-long into this twenty-first century info-wall (which had openings for ads and money from the forest industry), Lasn retaliated by founding the Adbusters Media Foundation, ―a global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs,‖ who aim to ―topple existing power structures and forge a major shift in the way we will live in the 21st century‖ (Adbusters website, www..org). These are rather extreme goals and ideals, and as such a point of debate concerning our social structure that this thesis will attempt to codify.

Adbusters is one very visible element of a growing movement in activist circles called culture jamming. Culture Jamming is a creative form of communication that seeks to dispel particular ―myths‖ espoused by multinational corporations and supportive concerning the promises of globalization (e.g. ―big is better,‖ ―more is better,‖ or globalization will serve to benefit all corners of the world). Take for example December 3, 2004, and the actions of a group of activists called the Yes Men. The date was the twentieth anniversary of the Union Carbide (UC) chemical disaster in Bhopal, India. More specifically, it was a day of memorial for 3,800 people who were killed and upwards of 100,000 left seriously ill because of gas leaking from a tank at UC Bhopal's chemical plant, one of the largest industrial disasters in world history.

The week before the anniversary, a web page, dowethics.com, received an email from the British Broadcasting Company. The BBC was looking for a representative from Dow Chemical (who now owns the Union Carbide division) to appear on an interview show to discuss the disaster‘s twentieth anniversary. Dowethics.com, however, is not the official domain of Dow Chemical; the site belongs to the Yes Men. Dow.com is the domain for Dow Chemical, but the producers at the BBC were too hastened to notice their error because the Yes Men had mirrored the appearance of Dow website in such a way that to a non-discerning viewer, the site appeared quite official (compare them for yourself1). The Yes Men responded and accepted the invitation to appear on the program as a Dow representative. They sent, Mr. Jude (patron saint of the impossible) Finisterra (earth’s end), who explained, during the interview, that Dow felt it was time to completely address the issues of Bhopal by extending a $12 billion plan to compensate the victims. Mr. Finisterra also pushed for the extradition of former Union Carbide C.E.O. Warren Anderson to India to face homicide charges, relating to the event, that he had fled twenty years prior. Of course, none of this was Dow policy; rather it referred to a larger and more humane vision of what its policy could be. This action was a political maneuver committed by the Yes Men in order to confuse the way the public identifies with the corporate Dow Chemical.

The result of this elaborate was a momentary three percent drop in the value of Dow Chemical‘s stock price ($2 billion total, according to CNN), and top ranking on Google News (news.google.com, an index of major news stories) for the remainder of the day. The hoax obviously gained the attention of millions of people. Attention, however, is one thing, while change is another, and Dow did not change. They simply came out and exposed the Yes Men as imposters and liars, retracted anything and everything said by the character of Mr. Finisterra, and took every step to assure that business reverted back to normal. On the other hand, to credit of the Yes Men, Dow was forced to publicly address an issue that they consistently had chosen avoid, because it was threatening to the profit motives and the corporate identity of the company.

The media attention and monetary results that occurred here are high profile examples of culture jamming: a ―semiological guerrilla warfare‖ (Eco, p.135) that hijacks ―form in order to change content‖ (Khamis, 2003). These two phrases are important as this thesis unfolds and tracks the movement of culture jamming. ‘s ―semiological guerrilla warfare‖ (SGW) refers to a broad context where a battle over signification is taking place, in which tactically, small- organized groups challenge superior forces with sudden acts of harassment. In coining the term SGW he was ―purposing an action to urge the audience to control the message and its multiple possibilities of interpretation‖ (p. 143). Additionally, Khamis recognizes the strategy that aims to change signification or content by re-appropriating form. Because those in positions of institutional power are able to use communicative form and structures in a strategic way, the semiological guerrillas must use their own concepts of strategic communication to develop tactics that are capable of meeting their adversaries in the same arena. These two thoughts combined offer a portrait of culture jamming that goes a long way in characterizing the

1 I googled the terms ―dow chemical‖ on 12/21/05. Dow.com was listed first, and dowethics.com was listed second. I also googled the terms ―Dow chemical Bhopal‖ and this time dowethics.com remained second only to be trumped by theyesmen.org, the cyber-home of the Yes Men. Dow.com was ranked third. 2 movement. There are of course nuances to context, strategy, and tactics, but when one enters into a battle over cultural signification, using momentary acts of harassment aimed at identity, one is engaging in culture jamming.

It is also useful to view acts of culture jamming as rebellious designs that use ―counter messages that hack into a ‘s own method of communication‖ (Klein, 2002, p. 281), and foster change in the ―way in which we interact with and the way in which meaning is produced in society‖ (Lasn, 1999, p. xi). Or simply put, a ―semiotic version of ju-jitsu,‖ (Jordan & Taylor, 2004, p. 82) which turns the original purpose of a cultural artifact or piece of communication back on itself to create another meaning.

The example I am choosing to highlight in this thesis is the Yes Men. The Yes Men practice an art, or a form of , that they call ―identity correction.‖ Basically, it is a media hoax, and a show of theatrics put on for attention. But, more specifically for the Yes Men it is an act of ―public humiliation‖ aimed at large corporations and economic elites. As the above Dow example points out, they do this by using various media channels as a stage to redefine the images and portrayals of the characters of power in a globalized and corporatized world.

The targets they choose for correction are world leaders and corporations that value profits to an extreme beyond anything else. The unsettled ingredient, however, is that the Yes Men use , or a hoax, to gain attention to their version of the truth. Or, to put it less accusatory, they use theatrics to tell their version of the truth: a prank. Either way, they rely heavily on the hoax or the prank in order to unmask what they see as the truth behind the global economic order. The contradiction here should jump right out at you, and you should ask, ―How can one speak the truth while living a lie?‖

This thesis, along with developing a contemporary snapshot in the continuously evolving book of culture jamming, will delve into the contradictions of untruths used to promote truths. For example, basic communication theory tells us that inherent in legitimizing one‘s case or argument is the conviction that the source is valid. The Yes Men, and other culture jammers, portray themselves as authorities, but they often poach their credentials from someone or something else. This prompts a debate where opponents may see their tactics as lies and deception, while supporters may view it as theatrical activism. The line between real and fantasy blurs, and culture jammers are poised to take advantage of the misty fog.

Theatrum mundi, or 'all the world is a stage', is both literal and figurative in these hijinks, and a useful colloquialism through which to view the context of culture jamming. I use this phrase as a metaphor to direct us towards the French Situationist movement‘s notion of Spectacle. The main text of the movement, ‘s The Society of the Spectacle, argues that society is driven by forces that entice us to behave as an audience, and simply observe and watch rather than actively participate. The forces of DeBord‘s Spectacle promote separation of voice from the masses, and leaves communication and information primarily in the hands of the powerful and elite. The Situationists argue that we are living in society that draws us toward passive observation rather than active participation, and thus, if voices are to be of consequence, it is nigh mandatory that they be packaged as part of the narcotic of Spectacle.

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As stated, the Yes Men come in costume and brandish their in the form of a hoax or a prank. These tactics engage spectacle, but may prove to be a concern in legitimizing an argument in the battle for social justice in another way: they may slip into the realm of entertainment, or mere fun (Pace, 2003). We have holidays, April Fool‘s Day and Halloween, which celebrate this behavior for its frivolity not for its social impact. The question we must ask is, when does the social message these tactics are designed to convey become diminished by its entertainment value. Or, do the mischievous antics take away from the serious social messages they are trying to convey. As a form of , I will explore this matter in this thesis.

The Yes Men are tactical culture jammers in that they re-appropriate in a fleeting sense. Their critique is momentary and then it is gone. They do not change policy, they do not fight to legislate, and they do not shut down entities with their bodies and physical presence. What they do is irradiate what they deem as a systematic failure in a neoliberal system that increasingly caters to profit rather than humanity.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to answer questions of success when dealing with a form of dissent that is as reliant on the symbolic as culture jamming is. Yet, what we can explore is the question of mechanics and tactics and their ability to suggest better . As this thesis proceeds, I will unpack the place of the Yes Men in the historical context of culture jamming; address the questions of the hoax and the prank as legitimate purveyors of argument and social protest; and I will take an in-depth look at The Yes Men as they combine the culture jamming and mechanisms with their strategies and goals for social protest in a technologically advancing society.

Marshall McLuhan said, ―World War III will be a guerrilla information war…fought not in the sky or on the streets, but in newspapers and magazines, on the , on TV and in cyberspace‖ (quoted in Lasn, p. 123-124). ‗World War III‘ is hopefully a bit harsh, but the struggles of the new millennium are sure to concern the control of information, as it is one of the great resources of humanity.

McLuhan leads me to make one last point before beginning this thesis proper. There are larger, yet esoteric issues at stake that envelop culture jamming. To some, culture jamming is a form of resistance, to some it is way to merge art with politics, and to others it is a harbinger of . For myself, a graduate student studying communication and culture, I approach it as being born out of a marriage of two ideas from the Italian semiotician Umberto Eco and the English professor Marshall McLuhan. Both scholars, writing and working in the 1960‘s, recognized a sea change emerging in our lives because of new technologies that channel our communication as and as a society. McLuhan wrote extensively that as the mass media became more and more of an influence in lives, the individual dies, and a new man is born on a new scale. He furthered his point, in the classic Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964, republished in 1994), by writing, ―the effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily without any resistance‖ (McLuhan, p. 18). Media and technology change us as human beings, and McLuhan warns that it is at a level within ourselves where we do not bother to resist. Three years later, Eco characterized McLuhan‘s ideas of media and technology merging into the panoptic landscape of our culture as a ―narcotic of passiveness‖ (p. 137) that needed

4 intervention. According to Eco and McLuhan, when the mass media triumphed as the source of dominant tropes in society, a level of perceptiveness and awareness in the individual died and man was driven to perceive the world in a new way. Not knowing whether these new versions of perception were good or bad, Eco called for ―communications guerrillas‖ to patrol this new terrain, and ―restore a critical dimension to passive reception‖ (Eco, p. 144).

Eco‘s guerillas are the culture jammers of today, acting out their struggles in the theater of McLuhan‘s mediated vision of the world. I am drawn to these two voices because of the significance they hold to what I personally see at stake in today‘s world. I believe there is ample evidence to argue that we live in a society where the corporate influence in media and government is felt in a predominant way (see, Chomsky, 2002; Gitlin, 1980; Jhally, 1989; Schiller, 1989, etc.), and that presence is playing a large role in determining the saliency of particular themes in our lives. What results is that the issues of racial and economic inequality, corporate malfeasance, governmental accountability, and environmental are being overlooked or at best handled inadequately, in favor of allegiances to corporate , corporate agendas, and the corporate dollar‘s influence in government.

McLuhan, Eco, and many others are warning us to be critical of the western tradition of progress that leads to ―the assumption,‖ as defined by historian Sidney Pollard, ―that a pattern of change exists in the history of mankind…that it consists of irreversible changes in one direction only, and that this direction is towards improvement‖ (as quoted in Wright, p. 3). In his quick-witted book, A Short history of Progress, Ronald Wright points out myriad instances in the long history of mankind in which progress, leading to bigger and more things, is not always best for a civilization. Wright calls these phenomena a ―progress trap.‖ The obvious examples are bombs that can blow up the planet hundreds of times over, and excessive pollution and the destruction of the biosphere as the planet becomes more industrially advanced. My favorite, however, illustrates how Paleolithic hunters devised an all-you-can-eat wooly mammoth buffet, and drove themselves into starvation. It goes like this: when hunters of the age discovered methods to kill two mammoths rather than one, they had made progress, but when they learned how to kill entire herds by driving them over cliffs, the tribe eventually starved because they had too much to consume and the excess rotted away, while the mammoth population dwindled. Eventually, the avarice delivered negative consequences that early-human tribes suffered from greatly. Certainly we are more advantaged in today‘s age, but that may simply lead us deeper into cavernous extremes.

We are, right now, experiencing a globalized system, driven by market logic that philosophically guides us to ignore excess and reward greed. Of course, I am taking a risk here by speaking from this generalized soapbox, and from a comfortable situation as a graduate student, but that is why I am interested in forms of social activism. Problems need to be addressed, and solutions are not satisfactory until they are comprehensive and complete.

The inevitable pile-on toward ―the end of history‖ is not predestined. We are not done philosophizing new social systems, new economic systems, or new systems of government (Alperovitz, 2005). If we are to get a grip and address the problem that contemporary society and the current has with disproportions of resources, at every level, we need to

5 communicate in broader forms that are more democratic and open to everyone. We may have some designs that work, but we also have much to be improved upon. I am interested in culture jamming because it asks us as citizens to remain critical, to remain vigilant, and to remain creative, and always with an eye toward achieving a balance. Basically, to me it communicates the message: profit is not progress. I think we make the mistake, of the opposite, in too many ways.

This thesis is designed to explore the state of culture jamming in the new millennium as it relates to the Situationist notion of the Spectacle, the shortcomings and positive aspects of the use of the prank and the hoax, and the mechanics and tactics that show promise with the emergence of an advanced technological society predicated on information. The context is the Spectacle, the theoretical basis is culture jamming, and the Yes Men are the unit to be analyzed. Let us begin.

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CHAPTER 2

LITERATURE REVIEW

The Theory Behind Jamming the Spectacle 2.0

Culture jamming is a critique of , using various forms of media to channel messages. When messages are re-appropriated, it is culture jamming. When advertisements are parodied and websites are copied in order to divert the originally intended message, it is culture jamming. Street theater and acts of surreal expression can be considered culture jamming. And, when the Yes Men masquerade on television or at an international conference of world business leaders that is culture jamming.

Jamming has taken many forms and uses various mediums, but the message remains tied to the purpose of reminding the ‗good consumer‘ that he or she should first be a ‗good citizen.‘ Many jammers argue the case against neo-liberal economic policy or corporate laws, but when boiled down to its essence, the movement is best described as a wake-up call to individual consciousness. The messages of culture jamming ask people to recognize the entirety of institutions such as the advertising industry, the World Trade , or corporate culture. Some facts about these bodies can be interpreted as contradictory to what their PR machines would like us to believe, and culture jammers attempt to point that out. The goal of culture jammers is that in highlighting these misrepresentations the public may call for a stronger demand for improvement. Culture jams do not necessarily ask for change directly; they ask for public awareness and suggest improvement, and with that, the hope is that social change will follow.

To some, like Kalle Lasn, the founder of The Adbusters Media Foundation, culture jamming is the ―most significant of the next twenty years‖ (p. xi), defined by a treatise of meta- and big ideas aimed at revolutionizing society. To others such as the Billboard Liberation Front (BLF) of (www.billboardliberation.com), or Australia‘s Billboard Utilizing Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions (BUG-UP) (Klein, p. 282), culture jamming is a retaliatory reclamation of that has been overrun with commercial messages. Then, there are some jammers such as Jonah Peretti, who, in his ―Nike Adventure2,‖ have tested corporate policy from within the company‘s commercial aspirations, pushed the ‗rules‘ a bit too far, and then shared the email dialogue virally through the arteries of cyberspace (Peretti).

2 Peretti took advantage of an offer on the Nike corporate website that offered customers a chance to personalize their sneakers. Nike offered its customers the service of embroidering a name or message, of their choice onto their Nike sneakers. Peretti requested the term ―‖ for his shoes. Nike refused Peretti‘s customized request in a number of emails shared between the two parties, which eventually got sent around the world after Peretti shared them with a few friends. 7

The San Francisco collage band first coined the term ―culture jam‖ on the album Jamcon ‘84 (Dery, p. 9; Klein, p. 281). It was a tribute to ham radio ―jammers‖ who clogged the airwaves with loose-lipped Mickey Mouse impersonations and other audio fuzz. In order to philosophize the term, one band member remarked, ―As awareness of how the media environment we occupy affects and directs how our inner life grows, some resist...The studio for the cultural jammer is the world at large‖ (quoted in Dery, 1999, & Pickerel, et al.). Theatrum mundi.

Theory supporting culture jamming amounts to a calculated rejection of oppressive , a gearing toward dismantling them, followed by the creating and implementation of new systems. That is what this chapter will explore. First, the oppressive paradigm of the ―Spectacle,‖ second, the tactics of culture jamming aimed at dismantling the ―Spectacle,‖ and third the concept of a world based on direct involvement rather than separation and spectatorship.

The Spectacle 2.1

Culture jamming is not new in the twenty-first century. It is a response to what Guy DeBord and the Situationist International (SI) movement of the 1950‘s and 1960‘s called ―spectacle‖ (Harold, p. 192; Kellner & Best, p. 80-94; Klein, p. 282; Lasn, p. 99-109; Wettergren, p. 29). The term spectacle was their way of theorizing contemporary society. The Situationists were a group of French avant-garde thinkers--formed out of the Dutch experimental group Cobra and the iconoclastic Lettrists--who found themselves ―on the crest of an ongoing shift between a modern society organized around the production of commodities and the accumulation of capital‖ (Kellner & Best, p. 79), and what they came to identify as a postmodern society socially controlled by the ―society of the spectacle,‖ a spectacle that offered the comforts of life through ―a world of mesmerizing images and stupefying forms of entertainment‖ (ibid., 79-80; Dery, Lasn).

The of spectatorship and unengaged lifestyles was forefront for DeBord and the SI, just as it is for activists today. The concept has been articulated in DeBord‘s book, The Society of the Spectacle (1995, but first published in France as La Societe du Spectacle, in 1967). DeBord and his writings were deeply influential in the Situationist International (SI). The SI were initially a small experimental group that played a key role in catalyzing the May 1968 student revolt in France by galvanizing action through clever sloganeering and that presented an abstract and generalized critique of the entire global system.

In DeBord‘s words, the society of the spectacle resulted in a way of life in which, ―everything that was directly lived has receded into representation‖ (DeBord #1). As the spectacle increasingly influenced people, it materialized their . The concern he wrote was that ―in all of its particular manifestations — news, , advertising, entertainment — the spectacle represents the dominant model of life‖ (DeBord, #6). For DeBord, the Situationists, their contemporaries, and cultural critics to follow, the developing spectacle was viewed as dangerous because of the control it influenced over a pacified and depoliticized society. DeBord called these acts a ―permanent opium war‖ (#44), which had the effect of removing the reactionary qualities of the masses and dulling the responses to the political and humanitarian problems of the world by leading people to equate the accumulation of goods and commodities

8 with the meaning of life. The SI saw active and involved lifestyles reverting to an existence pacified by spectacle.

Concerning DeBord‘s spectacle, Kellner and Best (19??) point out that Marxian theory spoke of the collapse of ―being into having,‖ in which the creation of a product is surpassed in importance by the mere possession of it (p. 85). As the theories of evolved from Marx to DeBord and beyond, having was supplanted by appearing, where the ―material object gives way to its semiotic representation‖ (ibid.). Simply having an economic commodity had to be backed up by the prestige and ultimate purpose of its appearance. A ghost was born in the economic machine, and it was shaping social forces in an increasing abstract and cultural sense.

The importance of appearance in the way the Situationists envisioned it was that as ―the real world is transformed into mere images, mere images become real beings‖ (DeBord #18). The struggle was becoming highly contested in a mediated and abstract sense through varied cultural and social channels, mainly media, rather than in the physical/natural world.

Media was viewed, in the increasingly mediated society of mid-century France, as a rigid structure that was able to create its own rules and enhancement possibilities. The ruling class was viewed as having a never-ending feedback loop promoting itself and improving its image. ―The spectacle is the ruling order‘s nonstop discourse about itself, its never-ending monologue of self-praise, its self-portrait at the stage of totalitarian domination of all aspects of life‖ (DeBord, #24). The SI and DeBord were railing against the unilateral aspects of the communication society that they were living in, and they passionately fought for change in order to avoid the slow corroding of the human spirit and psyche. More recently, Kalle Lasn recognized a historic shift in social movement in the emergence of the Situationist thought of the period. He saw the Situationists as being the first who ―applied [the] spirit of to modern …They were in a sense the first postmodern revolutionaries‖ (Lasn, p. 100).

Revolutionaries from DeBord to Lasn have been concerned over one of the key aspects in the emergence of a society of spectacle: the merging of information and entertainment, as well as the blunting of broad distinctions within genres. This is because, the blurring of the line between entertainment and information, affects the private lives of citizens and their engagement in life in ways that I will draw out below.

Situationists agreed that cultural industries continuously angled to enhance a controllable and thus profitable society. As such, the spectacle has become increasingly implicated in the ―organizing principles of the economy, polity, society, and everyday life‖ (Kellner, p. 1), and thus invested in maintaining a particular status quo. Kellner has further argued that the blurring of information and entertainment is increasingly implicated in the creation of societal values that serve to indoctrinate individuals in a withdrawn, separated way of life. The threat of a withdrawn citizenry is an unengaged majority of the public pacified by spectacle enhancing entertainment while disregarding critical and valuable information. It is a public pacified by superficial utterances of real world problems coming from an information based society that is increasingly controlled by spectacle, tapping into a value system that is far too individualized and materialized. Politics of the are supplanted by an based on materialism that pits individuals against one another.

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One core result of the absorption of information into entertainment is the distinction that develops between an active and a passive . Just as a capitalist society separates workers from the products of their labor, spectacle separates citizens from actively engaging in the society that they are responsible for and currently living in. According to Kellner, ―[t]he concept of spectacle therefore involves a distinction between passivity and activity, and production, condemning lifeless consumption of spectacle as an alienation from human potentiality for creativity and imagination‖ (2003, p. 3). The more the information necessitated by informed citizenship is engulfed into spectacle, the more the need to engage life is pushed out because the spectacle provides all that one may need, and creates the ―moment when the consumption has attained the total of social life‖ (DeBord, #42). Thus, as interests that create spectacle increasingly control information, the result is an information-based society that is ―ruled by the dictates of advertising and a commercialized culture‖ (Kellner, 2003, p. 3). Action and ‗real world‘ issues are relegated to the shadows of culture, because as they are not beneficial to the growth and homogenization of spectacle.

This homogenization is poisonous to society, and it drives movements from the SI to today‘s culture jammers. The antidote is an actively engaged lifestyle that promotes wide-ranging views and information from greater diversified sources. Nothing is much more useless to society than flicking through all your major TV news stations and simultaneously finding ongoing coverage about a runaway bride or a multi-million dollar athlete (who is also an advertising machine) who cannot agree to the amount of millions he is promised in his contract. These examples are minor news, but major spectacles. According to Lasn, these occurrences result in media spectacles that have ―colonized our mental environment,‖ and crowded out ―history and context‖ (p. 11).

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have also taken up concepts that bear a resemblance to Spectacle in their work, Empire, and I would feel neglectful to move on without some mention of their important work. The authors‘ theory of world order, which they have named ‗Empire,‘ has emerged from the shift between societies of discipline when power ruled ―in effect by structuring the parameters and limits of thought and practice, sanctioning and prescribing normal and/or deviant behaviors‖ (p. 23) through disciplinary institutions (the prison, the factory, the asylum, the hospital, the school, etc.), to societies of control in which the production of the ―social being‖ is characterized by ―control that extends throughout the depths of the consciousness and bodies of the population--and at the same time across the entirety of social relations‖ (p. 24), fueled by ―knowledge, communication, and language‖ (p. 29). The authors addressed the concept of spectacle (without directly using the term) as an ―imperial machine [that] lives by producing a context of equilibria and/or reducing complexities, pretending to put forward a project of universal citizenship and toward this end intensifying the effectiveness of its intervention over every element of the communicative relationship, all the while dissolving identity and history‖ (p. 34). The quote is a bit laden with jargon, but concise in explaining the broad concept of spectacle. The primary points to take away form Hardt and Negri‘s definition are about ―reducing complexities‖ and creating ―universal citizenship‖ by intervening ―over every element of the communicative relationship.‖

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In the particular section of Empire (1.2, Biopolitical Production, p. 22-41) that I feel addresses similar concepts to those of DeBord, et al., Hardt and Negri consult the ideas of Michel Foucault and a related postscript by Gilles Deleuze. The epicenter being when Foucault tersely told us, ―Life has now become…an object of power‖ (quoted in Hardt and Negri, p. 24). Delueze (1990) described this new formulation of life as a result of a societal crisis that birthed a new monster that Foucault recognized as our immediate future. The new monster, as named by William Burroughs, is ‗control.‘ The central role, previously occupied by labor, in a control society is today increasingly occupied by intellect, immaterial goods, and the power of communication (Hardt & Negri, p. 29), all of which are largely symbolic.

Thus, as we move on to talk about the forces of resistance up against the Society of Spectacle, the societies of control, or Empire, it is time to start asking ourselves what forms social or resistance are equipped to combat these concepts of contemporary society that warn us that we are being manipulated and/or controlled by an ‗imperial machine,‘ as Hardt and Negri call it, that has no external standpoint. I like to think of culture jamming as an emerging design that illustrates one particular tactic. Culture jamming takes advantage of technologies and mechanisms that exist in today‘s milieu, recognizes the communication-rich environment that we are in, and threatens the spectacle, the empire, or simply the power relationships that exist between sender and receiver of information. I will now move on to culture jamming and its modern day practitioners.

Culture Jamming Against The Spectacle 2.20

―Can we already grasp the rough outlines of these coming forms, capable of threatening the joys of ? Many young people strangely boast of being ‘motivated‘; they re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It‘s up to them to discover what they‘re being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of the disciplines.‖ ---Gilles Deleuze

As noted, the ―spectacle‖ is a way of understanding contemporary society. Viewed past and present, it encompasses everything from , art galleries, sporting events, radio, television, etc. It is the everyday sights, sounds, and ideas that one must process in order to interact with the world. In the eyes of many, it is a becoming increasingly commodified and consumed simply out of reflex due to a saturated media environment.

To combat the spectacle, the Situationists practiced a strategy of detournment, an attempt to merge art and politics (Kellner & Best), meaning literally to ―detour,‖ ―hijack‖ (Harold, p. 192), or ―turn around‖ (Lasn, p. 103). In theory, it means to lift an image, message, or artifact out of its original context to create new meaning (Klein, p. 282). The modern day culture jammers practice a form of detournment that has evolved in a different direction than comparable avant- garde movements of the past. The SI, , and Surrealist movements of the past tended to

11 focus on the and its ―passive culture of spectatorship‖ (Klein, p. 283), whereas the contemporary movements of culture jamming manipulate the surrounding world in a more political and social context.

One writer to point out the changes that evolved from the prankster and nonconformity elements of the artistic Situationists and the more politicized context of culture jammers in the twenty-first century is the journalist, and author of , . Klein forwards the idea that culture jammers carry an inherently more political tone than their predecessors, out of necessity, because the counter cultural messages of the sixties have been co-opted by commercial culture. She writes (p. 283):

So where Situationist Asger Jorn hurled paint at pastoral bought at flea markets, today‘s culture jammers prefer to hack into corporate advertising and other avenues of corporate speech. And if the culture jammers‘ messages are more pointedly political than their predecessors‘, that may be because what were indeed subversive messages in the sixties--―Never Work,‖ ―It Is Forbidden To Forbid,‖ ―Take Your Desires For Reality‖ -- now sound more like Sprite or Nike : Just Feel It. And the ―situations‖ or ―‖ staged by political pranksters in 1968, though genuinely shocking and disruptive at the time are the Absolute Vodka ad of 1998.

The connection between the DeBord‘s Situationists and the modern practices of culture jamming has been documented many times (Dery, p. 9; Harold, p. 192; Klein, p. 282; Lasn, p. 99-109; Wettergren, p. 29). Kalle Lasn, for example, considers his group, The Adbusters Media Foundation, to be the modern day torchbearers to what he described as the ―first postmodern revolutionaries‖ (p. 100).

A benchmark of recognition of modern day culture jamming tactics is Lasn launching the Adbusters Media Foundation (AMF) in 1989. The AMF is one of the highest profile and most well-funded organizations connected to the movement of culture jamming. They publish Adbusters, a magazine dedicated to the movement, and maintain the web page Adbusters.org, a cyber-headquarters for many culture jammers (Wettergren, p. 29). Along with distributing their own clothing and assorted paraphernalia, the AMF sponsor campaigns for ―,‖ to keep people from the day following , and a yearly campaign called, ―TV Turn off Week‖ (www.adbusters.org).

Lasn has developed a to define the movement (as well as society) if his ideas are realized. Because of this, the AMF can be somewhat inflammatory because of its high profile and what some believe to be ‗holier-than-thou‘ stance concerning the movement. The best culture jam, for Lasn, is one that communicates his weapon in this revolution: the ―meta- meme3.‖

3 The ―‖ is a term developed by the biologist . It is the cultural equivalent of the biological gene. Dawkins describes it as a ―unit of cultural transmission,‖ such as ―tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes 12

Lasn‘s meta-memes are, in his opinion, the way to beat corporations and economic elites at their own communication game. He divides his arsenal into five meta-memes:

True Cost: In the global marketplace of the future, the price of every product will tell the ecological truth.

Demarketing: The marketing enterprise has now come full circle. The time has come to unsell the product and turn the incredible power of marketing against itself.

The Doomsday Meme: The global economy is a doomsday machine that must be stopped and re programmed.

No Corporate “I”: Corporations are not legal persons with constitutional rights and freedoms of their own, but legal fictions that we ourselves created and must therefore control.

Media Carta: Every human being has the ―right to communicate‖--to receive and impart information through any media.

Lasn is striving for a shift in the grand scheme of things, updated from the Situationists decades before. He has a wealth of ideas and promotes them, capitalizing on the culture jamming scene (Klein, p. 286). He in revolution, but his revolution can be characterized as fighting the corporate policy with the same corporate structure.

For example, when Adbusters chose to challenge the Nike communication apparatus, and promote their mega-memes against it, they developed a campaign that is oppositional in content but similar in form. They created advertisements in a corporate headquarters (in , B.C.), developed products to replace those of Nike, and conducted in order to find new and maintain existing customers. In doing all of this for their ―Blackspot‖ sneaker, Adbusters is creating a shoe that defies corporate sponsorship, but swears an allegiance to the Adbusters mystique. Consumers who choose the Blacksopt sneaker may choose it for various reasons, one being the allegiance to what the represents. In classic culture jamming , Adbusters has hijacked form in order to subvert content.

Adbusters and the like are fed up with the Spectacle, and are trying to create institutions to replace those that promote it. Although Harold (2004) has argued that even though ad parodists such as Adbusters ―see themselves as carrying the revolutionary mantle of the Situationists, DeBord and his comrades were decidedly opposed to parody as an effective rhetorical strategy, because it maintained, rather than unsettled, audiences‘ purchase of the truth‖ (p.192).

, ways of making pots or of building arches,‖ that replicate themselves by ―spreading form brain to brain.‖ They evolve over time but much faster than the biological gene. 13

This is where Adbusters‘ theory of culture jamming differs from other practitioners who develop their critique through more theatrical means. Namely, groups like the Yes Men who use the art of the prank or the hoax to channel their messages of dissent. Theatrical dissent does not so much rewrite as it reinterprets. The exploits of pranksters challenge our understanding of the world by introducing characters onto the world stage that violate dominant paradigms, and either push reality to an unacceptable extreme or offer alternatives to the current system. Systemic change rather than change within the system.

Billy & Joey 2.21

When the Yes Men show up for an economic conference, they are not there to twist meaning into something new; rather, they are there to push the beliefs in the room to a logical extreme and bring about reflection. It normally does not happen, as we will see below, but it offers more than simply saying ―no‖ without a shred of an alternative. I would like to share two brief examples of the use of the more theatrical based hoax in the realm of culture jamming in order to understand how jammers use these tactics to promote their arguments in contrast to the direct parody tactics of Lasn and Adbusters.

The first is the Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping (www.revbilly.com). Reverend Billy is a man of the gospel who compels his followers to ―stop shopping‖ and resist the consumer impulses that they often act out through reflex. He takes his pulpit into high profile Disney stores (among others) and preaches stories of sweatshop labor, corporate misconduct, and consumer driven apathy. For example, he will enter a Disney outlet, often in , give a sermon on the corporate ills of the giant Disney, and proceed to question customers about their consumer motives and whether or not the product and its symbolism is worth more to them than the heartbreaking tales of Disney‘s corporate culture. Billy is a man of solutions at his micro level. He preaches from inside stores in order to drive customers out. He offers alternatives for how these consumers can spend their day. Moreover, he often makes a big enough splash to get coverage through mainstream news outlets.

Lasn and Billy mount their attack with similar levels of passion and devotion. However, Billy is a man of immediate solution-based messages, whereas Lasn is a man of condemnation and hell- fire in a campaign that parodies the corporate style of advertising. Reverend Billy uses the hoax, although he considers his actions completely serious and genuine, in order impress his message in a very real way that hits his audience on a direct level. Lasn on the other hand, uses his campaign to offer an abstract version of the way he believes society should be. In many ways, Lasn is simply trying to re-brand consumer America.

What sets Billy and his antics apart from an organization such as Adbusters is his use of to gain visibility. People who have heard of Reverend Billy have more often than not been introduced to him through news coverage, whereas Adbusters purchases commercial spots, sells a magazine, and has a virtual store to sell its products. Billy finds his way into the agenda-setting practices of , and while his antics may be perceived as somewhat fantastical, the channel through which he is observed is the mainstream and culturally legitimized news sources, such as CNN and local news affiliates.

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A second example is that of , an old-timer in the art of the hoax. He has been conducting his schemes since as far back as 1966 (Dery, p. 12). His goal is to highlight the voracious appetite that the media have for entertaining news stories. One of his most famous stunts was his Cathouse for Dogs. The Cathouse was a doggie brothel he up in a storefront in Soho that offered pooch prostitutes ranging from ―pedigree (Fifi the French poodle) to mutt (Lady the Tramp)‖ (ibid.). Skaggs‘ tactics are fashioned to be irresistible to news outlets, thus eliciting coverage for his antics. However, for Skaggs the antics are simply bait in order to gain attention. In his words (ibid.),

The hoax is just the hook. The second phase, in which I reveal the hoax is the important part. As Joey Skaggs, I can‘t call a press conference to talk about how the media has been turned into a government propaganda machine, manipulating us into believing we‘ve got to go to war in the Middle East. But as a jammer, I can go into these issues in the process of revealing the hoax.

To me this use of media is key to understanding the nuance of the hoax or the prank in the culture jamming movement. More than simply parodying an entity by manipulating an advertisement or advertising campaign, or by creating one, the hoax gains attention by exploiting the voracious hunger of the media to present news that is above all else entertaining. By using theatrics, the media is lured in, via the high level of entertainment value in today‘s society. In the process, the media are critiqued for their willingness to cover such stories as news, while at the same time the hoax may be aimed at another entity of the activist‘s choosing. The hoax itself then is news that offers a critique on multiple levels: a critique of an infotainment based society, and a critique on the entities that profit from and promote such a society.

The Yes Men 2.22

In recent years, some of the most successful theatrical pranks have been pulled off by the Yes Men. Their achievements come from skilled creation of mirror images they construct of their intended targets in cyberspace, by copying the design of a web page, and posting their own that looks strikingly similar. Their first achievement was in 1999 when they built the www.gwbush.com web page to look similar to the official www.georgewbush.com, run by the campaign of the future president. The Bush team took offense to the information on the site (past drug use, environmental record, etc.) and at one point George W. was famously quoted as saying, ―there ought to limits to freedom,‖ in reference to the uncensored page. As a result of this project, other useful domain names fell into the lap of the Yes Men thanks to their growing reputation.

One of the most profitable alter egos that they have is that of www.gatt.org. The page is a mirror image of the ‘s web page, www.wto.org, with a few adjustments made to language and content. Gatt.org gets a considerable amount of traffic from searchers looking for the WTO, because the Global Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) was the predecessor

15 to the WTO. The people contacting the site see the layout, think that it is official, and thus correspond with the Yes Men at the other end rather than the actual WTO. Mike Bonanno, one of the Yes Men says they try to answer all questions and requests thoroughly and truthfully as the WTO would themselves if they were completely forthcoming.

After receiving one request for the WTO to send a representative to Finland, the Yes Men performed their first full blown costumed performance at a conference held for world leaders in the textile industry. The Finnish conference contacted what they thought to be the WTO, but they were actually conversing with the Yes Men, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno4, behind the pages of the gatt.org site. This triggered the birth of Dr. Hank Hardy Unruh, the ‗golden- boy‘ of the WTO, and the Yes Men headed to Finland.

The program they presented, as the keynote address for the ―Textiles of the Future‖ conference held at the Tampere University in Tampere, Finland, was titled, ―Towards the Globalization of Textile Trade‖ (Bichlbaum, et al, 2004). In the audience were one hundred and fifty international research engineers, business-people, officials, and academics working in industries ranging from medicine to defense (ibid.). They began the presentation by assuring the audience that they, as the WTO, were working on methods to remove all roadblocks that hindered profitable economic results. The goal was ―a free and open global economy, that will best serve corporate owners and stockholders alike‖ (ibid., p. 82). The audience approved, even as the speaker proceeded to make several outlandish claims about the relationships between management and workforce. The most outrageous came after Dr. Unruh assured the audience that he was ―himself an abolitionist,‖ but felt that the U.S. Civil War was a waste of time. In the opinion of Dr. Unruh, and by representation, the WTO, he felt that given time markets would have eventually replaced slave labor with ―cleaner‖ sources of labor. His argument was that eventually the importing of slaves to the new world would have become an exceedingly bulky way to do business. Eventually, in a global market place, corporations would have and have realized that rather than importing labor, it was more cost efficient to export production. would have eventually gone the way of the Dodo, and evolved into a remote labor system, very much like what we have today with outsourcing. These outrageous claims did not set off any hints of recognition in the audience that this might be a put-on, so the guys plugged away. The lecture climaxed with the topic of management‘s control over this remote labor pool. The solution: The Management Leisure Suit (MLS).

When Dr. Unruh arrived in the lecture hall, he was dressed in what looked like a typical businessman‘s suit, but his ensemble was rigged with Velcro and designed to be torn off at the climactic moment to reveal the future of business-casual, the MLS. When the time came, Dr. Unruh‘s assistant approached, grabbed him by the collar and the crotch, and ripped the suit off his body to expose a gold-lamé, full-bodied, skin-tight outfit on the body of a representative of the WTO. The audience applauded, but the excitement was not complete. The full climax came when Dr. Unruh pulled a cord at his waist that triggered a CO2 cartridge inflating a remarkable golden phallic extension arising from the groin. This was the Employee Visualization

4 Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno are the names these men use when they are acting as the Yes Men, before they create alter egos in order to disguise themselves in the various projects. In the world of official records, and ID cards, Bichlbaum is , a writer and computer programmer living in France. Bonanno is Igor Vamos, a professor of media arts at Rensealar Polytechnic Institute, in upstate New York. 16

Appendage (EVA). Jutting out from Unruh like a three-foot erection, the EVA was equipped with a television monitor at the tip that allowed managers to visually monitor employees as they marched around the office or the town in their golden-erect glory. The MLS, the Yes Men bragged, assured a manager constant surveillance over his or her employees without impinging upon leisure time.

The Yes Men carried out the outlandish escapades of slavery revision and dressing in a golden leotard with a giant tele-erection, all in the guise of the WTO, and no one in the audience reacted negatively. They applauded politely and accepted the situation as simply the direction in which the WTO was moving. After the conference, they did receive one concern from a woman in attendance because she felt the suit was too male-centric, as she pointed out that women are mangers, too. Good for her.

The Yes Men‘s theatrics in Finland gained them a reasonable amount of media coverage, as they themselves had alerted the press to the hoax they undertook. Because of extensive press coverage, they felt that their stint as ―identity correctors‖ must certainly be over with their cover being blown. It was not, and another invitation arrived. This time it was for an accountant‘s association conference in Sydney, Australia. The Conference, ―Business Without Barriers,‖ wanted the WTO to attend to speak about ―agribusiness globalization.‖ The Yes Men were happy to oblige and agreed to send their expert on the subject, the fictitious Mr. Kinnithrung Sprat. A touchy moment arose when they were contacted and informed that the conference had been cancelled due to low enrollment. In reality, this was a good thing for anti-globalization activists because it showed a lack of interest in a troublesome subject, but for the Yes Men, this was a possibly a missed opportunity to make a point, and they did not know how many more chances they would get. They pursued the matter and convinced the organizers of the conference that Mr. Sprat was already on his way, and being in Singapore at the moment, he still wanted to stop in Sydney and give what the WTO had planned to be a very important speech. The conference organizers agreed to assemble an audience of business leaders and journalists, and make arrangements so that Mr. Sprat could still make his presentation. Relentless pursuit.

This time the Yes Men decided to take a slightly different approach. In the past, they had always been forthcoming with the media, after the fact, that they were hoaxing these conferences they had been invited to attend. This time, they planned to hoax the media as well. The plan was to disband the WTO. Kinnithrung Sprat delivered a speech, for over an hour, which offered statistics and facts as to why the WTO was such a destructive institution. At the end he made the bombshell announcement that, as of September 2002, the WTO would disband its charter and be replaced by an organization that was to have its foundation and basis in the United Nations Charter for Human Rights.

Surprisingly, this time the presentation was well received. At the luncheon that followed, the Yes Men conversed with attendees that saw this new human side to the WTO as a good thing. One man even said, ― I‘m as right-wing as the next guy, but it‘s about time we did something for these countries that we‘ve done so well by. We can‘t just go on like this it‘s impossible‖ (Bichlbaum, et al, p. 170).

17

The high-water moment came when John Duncan, a member of the Canadian parliament, addressed the issue in parliamentary proceedings. He was quickly informed of the hoax, but such a high profile guffaw by a member of the Canadian government grabbed quite a bit of coverage, and made the long flight to Sydney worth it.

Moving On…

Thus, as this array of tactics points out, culture jamming in itself is multi-facetted. I believe that there is a difference in tactical jamming between parody, conducted by the likes of Adbusters, and the theatrical prank or the hoax conducted by those such as Reverend Billy, Joey Skaggs, and the Yes Men. They all recognize the spectacle as the condition of contemporary society that is detrimental, but they attack it with different formulas.

I believe it is safe to say that Kalle Lasn and Adbusters would like to see one of their Blackspot sneakers sold for every Nike sold, not for the economic capital it is worth, but rather for the cultural capital it is worth. Such an occurrence would represent a shift in consumer sensibilities that reflects a deeper social consciousness. Whereas for practitioners of theatrical based culture jamming the goal is to work in a fashion described by Jeff Shantz‘ in his essay, ―Seize the Switches: TAO Communications, Media, and Anarchy,‖ in which he writes, ―marginal movements are typically rendered invisible by corporate mass media until they explode in the form of media events that call for public attention, and reveal the existence of profound challenges to everyday normalcy‖ (p.??). Theatrical tactics combat the invisibility problem by dramatizing issues to an extreme so that they become irresistible to media. The likes of Reverend Billy, Joey Skaggs, and the Yes Men achieve this with their ―image-events‖ and staged theatrics that do not boast another shoe that fits, but rather another way to wear it.

The sections that follow will first be a description of the methodology I plan to use to resolve the issues of the theatrical prank and hoax, and the place that they hold in culture jamming and activist circles, as I move on to the analysis portion of this thesis.

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CHAPTER 3

METHODOLOGY

This thesis is a work of cultural study, and being so it will analyze texts and discourse as they exist at a particular historical moment within culture. It will investigate the ―way in which cultural texts emerge from, and play a role in the changing historical, political, and social context‖ (Saukko, p. 99). Cultural studies ―is not about interpreting or judging texts or people, but about describing how people‘s everyday lives are articulated by and with culture, how they are empowered and disempowered by the particular structures and forces that organize their lives‖ (Grossberg, 1997, p. 4). It is a ‗contextual‘ approach rather than a purely ‗textual‘ analysis (ibid.).

Throughout my readings of cultural studies, I have come to understand that the field is a reformulated look at the Marxist notion of . Dominant ideology acts upon culture and distorts reality in ways that benefit those in power. In cultural studies, products of culture are a site of contestation over meaning ―where different groups compete to set forth their understandings of the state of affairs in the world‖ (Saukko, p. 100). Thus, the interest of cultural studies is the ―politics embedded in the process of forging a connection between signifier and signified‖ (ibid.), or the ―mapping/reconstructing [of] the relations between discourses, everyday life, and the machineries of power‖ (Grossberg, p. 5). In other words, it is a ―struggle over meaning‖ (Saukko, p.101) that does not deny inequality, but rather highlights it as contested terrain.

This terrain of contestation exists in what Du Gay, et al. have described as ―the circuit of culture‖ (p. 3). According to Du Gay, et al., the process through which ―any analysis of cultural text or artifact must pass‖ is the circuit of ―representation, identity, production, consumption, and regulation” (p. 3). In the case of this thesis, the Yes Men, being the unit of analysis, will be explored as to how they are represented, what social identities are associated with them, how they produce their work, and what mechanisms regulate their distribution and proliferation. Note that I have omitted the consumption aspect of the circuit, because I will not be conducting audience analysis or quantitative research as to the consumption of their acts. I will be conducting a qualitative review of who they are, who they are aligned with, how they do what they do, and through what channels they proliferate their messages. Consumption will be taken up in the conclusion when I suggest further research.

In order to make use of this circuit of culture, there must be specific data to analyze once inside. As mentioned many times, the Yes Men are the subject of this thesis, but the cultural products they produce for analysis must be further specified. Foremost, they create what Kevin DeLuca (1999) has described as ―image events.‖ An image event, in the case of the Yes Men, is a rhetorical activity of creative communication that attempts to change the way people think and act by enticing media attention and general (ibid.). In the case of this thesis, an image event is a formal term for the pranks of the Yes Men. Also, beyond what they do as activists, they are culturally represented by a number of media forms that have developed around them in terms of press coverage and various forms they themselves have created. They maintain a

19 website, they have written book, and documented their escapades on in the form of a full- length documentary distributed by United Artists.

This thesis will treat each cultural product of the Yes Men (the press coverage, the image events, the website, the book, and the film) as a piece of data that will be run through the circuit of culture. In order to better our understanding I will conduct close readings of the rhetorical language and images that have been used by the Yes Men in their pranks, and the media forms that culturally represent them.

First, the representation of the Yes Men will be analyzed through the discourse surrounding them that has grown out of various forms of third party media (the , or the press). This will serve as one aspect establishing their cultural meaning. Numerous press articles have been written about them in publications around the world. These articles are provided in an incomplete list on the Yes Men website (http://theyesmen.org/press/), along with which I will conduct a LexisNexis Academic database and Google News search in order to create a more comprehensive list. A data set of this type will allow me to conduct a close reading as to how the Yes Men are represented in the cultural and social landscape. DuGay, et al. have called this, ―the production of meaning through language,‖ or ―signification‖ (p. 13). This analysis will assist in measuring the cultural dimension of the Yes Men in a broad, although certainly non- encompassing sense relating to how they are represented in public consciousness. For example, what roll do these texts play in fixing the meaning of the Yes Men? What groups do they identify with, and who identifies with them? In the case of the Yes Men, as we shall see, this becomes a very murky yet interesting endeavor because of the clandestine nature that is required in their line of activism and organizational culture.

By examining the representations that form around the Yes Men, I want to take us down a path that will allow us to gain insight into the identity that emerges around this particular form of activism. If you turn to the Yes Men as a source, they will tell you that they are ―honest people‖ impersonating ―big-time criminals‖ (Yes Men website, http://theyesmen.org/). For them, the impersonations are acts of ―identity correction‖ that target ―leaders and big corporations who put profits ahead of everything else‖ (ibid.). However, identity is a multidimensional concept that is not left completely up to the source. For the Yes Men, as with any cultural or social actor, there may be a ―plurality of identities‖ (Castells, p. 6). Identity is constructed out of people‘s source of meaning and experience on the ―basis of a cultural attribute, or a related set of cultural attributes that is given priority over other sources of meaning‖ (ibid.). In the framework of what I am attempting to do, I want to unpack the Yes Men‘s multi-layered identity as it organizes meaning that identifies them as social actors. According to the sociologist Manuel Castells, all identities are constructed, but the ―real issue is how, from what, by whom, and for what‖ (p. 7). In simple terms, I want to understand what creates their significance in our culture. This will be accomplished with the aid of the representations that they are subjected to in press coverage, as well as the way they choose to represent themselves in the media they create of websites, books, and movies.

In The Power of Identity (2004), Manuel Castells has proposed three forms and origins of the construction of identity: legitimizing identity, resistance identity, and project identity. The first,

20 legitimizing identity, is a form of construction ―introduced by dominant institutions of society to extend and rationalize their domination vis à vis social actors‖ (p. 8). Such identity formation ―generates a civil society; that is, a set of organizations and institutions, as well as a series of structured and organized social actors, which reproduce the identity that rationalizes the sources of structural domination‖ (ibid.). This construct will be a primary concept in the analysis of the press coverage and third party representations that construct one aspect of the Yes Men identity.

Media or press coverage, here, will handled in much the same way that Jonah Peretti described it in his essay, ―Culture Jamming, Memes, Social Networks, and the Emerging ,‖ in which he illustrated three classes of media distribution technologies: micromedia, middle media, and mass media. Micromedia refers to ―personal communications technologies, including email, telephones, personal web sites,‖ middle media as the ―emerging publishing technologies that help communities filter and aggregate the messy jumble of content produced by micromedia,‖ and the familiar mass media of newspapers, radio, and television. This is relevant, because, as Peretti points out, the journalists of the mass media often find themselves covering the scripted press conferences and corporate press releases of the day that take their time away from digging up the authentic stories that fall outside of the dominant institutionalized structure of the media industry. Thus, when the mass media take up the story of the Yes Men, it is important to keep a critical eye on how they are portrayed in such coverage, because mass media often carry baggage levied on them by corporate scripts.

The second form of identity construction that Castells proposes is resistance identity. Resistance identity is generated by actors who are in positions that are devalued by domination, thus they build networks of resistance that are based on opposition to, or being different from, dominant institutions of society. This leads to the creation of community or collective resistance. The Yes Men construct their resistance identity through the media that they create themselves. By generating fans of their work, through visits to the website, viewers of the film, or readers of the book, they create a community of resistance with themselves at the center that spawns an identity based on being opposed to particular free-market policies and corporate .

If you visit the Yes Men website, watch the movie, or read the book, you are encouraged to become a Yes Man (or Yes Woman) yourself. Thus, they are increasingly building upon the community that they have created and seeking more ideas and more adventures.

The third of Castells‘ forms of identity construction is project identity, which occurs ―when social actors, on the basis of whatever cultural materials are available to them, build a new identity that redefines their position in society and, by so doing, seek the transformation of overall social structure‖ (p. 8). When the Yes Men undertake their projects of ―identity correction,‖ they are in this realm of creating identity through projects by challenging the greater structure and themes on which society has been historically based: the corporate structure, and the theme that profit is progress.

Following the circuit of culture further, in order to draw meaning and understand what new values culture jammers are attempting to inject into the public consciousness, we must pay attention to the production of the jams themselves. As mentioned above, Kevin DeLuca has given us the concept of the ―image event‖ in which to analyze the tactics of activist groups. In

21 his book, Image Politics: The New of Environmental Activism (1999), he metaphorically describes an ―image event‖ as ―a mind bomb that explodes in the public‘s consciousness to transform the way people view the world‖ (p. 1). Culture jams can be viewed in the same way. ―Success,‖ DeLuca writes, ―comes in reducing a complex set of issues to symbols that break people‘s comfortable equilibrium, get them asking whether there are better ways to do things‖ (p.3). Culture Jams, I contend, are image events, and as such I will be leaning on DeLuca‘s analysis of image events in the realm of environmental activism.

DeLuca‘s rhetorical approach to analysis asks us to go beyond the traditional perspective that views rhetoric as ―civil, reasoned, verbal discourse‖ (p. 14). This old-fashioned view, he argues, ―allows civility and decorum to serve as masks for the protection of privilege and the silencing of protest,‖ because ―such an understanding of rhetoric assumes a consensus on fundamental values and a in the system, which is antithetical to the very purpose of groups that are trying to produce social movement by challenging the legitimacy of the establishment‖ (p. 15). To combat the old habits, DeLuca encourages future analysis to shift the focus from how ―unorthodox rhetoric [such as the media of the Yes Men] constitutes the identities of protest groups to how it reconstitutes the identity of the dominant culture by challenging and transforming mainstream society‘s key discourses and ideographs‖ (p. 16). In the case of the Yes Men, I will look at how they use the projects they take on as mechanisms to challenge the legitimacy and the honesty of specific targets such as the WTO and Dow Chemical.

These ‗projects‘ or ‗image events‘ are closely aligned to Jarol Manheim‘s description of the corporate campaign, in The Death of a Thousand Cuts (2001). Manheim‘s concept of the corporate campaign leans heavily on the understanding that the corporation is a social actor that has an identity and reputation to maintain, which makes it potentially vulnerable to attacks on its character, or as the Yes Men would call it, ―identity correction.‖ While DeLuca‘s ―image event‖ concept allows for a critique of the rhetorical implications of the tactics of identity correction, Manheim‘s expertise on the corporate campaign offers a clear blueprint with which to examine the tactical organization that goes into a corporate (or anti-corporate) campaign strategy. He defines the corporate campaign as a ―term of art that refers to an assault of the reputation of a company that has somehow offended a union or some other interest‖ (p. vii). This is precisely what the Yes Men do.

Manheim addresses the media-centric qualities of the corporate campaign, just as DeLuca does, but for Manheim, it is aimed at a larger strategic goal, whereas DeLuca concentrates on rhetorically addressing tactical and individual events. DeLuca‘s approach to the analysis of image events will guide me through my analysis of the particular projects and tactics of the Yes Men, while Manheim will assist me as I compile the previously examined tactical measures into a larger strategic goal.

Manheim‘s core concern may very well be for that of corporate interest, but his understanding of the forces working against that interest is thorough and well thought out. In a struggle, two opposing sides can often have the same objectives, and Manheim‘s objective to understand what defines and claims the moral high ground in campaigns of corporate identity is essentially the same approach as the Yes Men, only each are aiming for a different set of values. For both, it is a morality play of high drama in which a battle takes place over who holds ―the power to decide

22 what is ‗true‘ about the behaviors and motives of the target company or industry‖ (Manheim, p. xiv). Corporate interests often protect their reputation or identity with many of the same measures as those who aim to damage the same reputation. I will devote a chapter of this thesis to the development of corporate identity, and the strategic whole of tactical measures aimed at disparaging such identities.

Finally, in order to understand cultural phenomena, we must relate our topic to wider cultural and social panorama (Saukko, p. 101). For culture jamming specifically, we must discuss the intertextuallity that exists between resistance and power and how it is viewed from varying perspectives. For example, the work of the Yes Men is a form of political protest, but over time, it has evolved into a documentary film with accompanying picture book. It had an initial impact at the moment that they carried out the missions, but a completely different impact emerges when press coverage follows, with the production of the film, and with its distribution to movie houses and into homes on DVD. Culturally these all have an impact in various sites of contestation, and the texts need to be individually unraveled to decode the political and cultural implications. These questions will be directed toward the complications of these instances moving activism into entertainment or pop-culture5. What dangers are imminent for the socially conscious activist? And what possibilities would a merger of entertainment and activism offer?

The sections that follow will be broken up much like this chapter was laid out. Chapter 4 will introduce the circuit of culture for itself and the chapters that follow. The remainder of the chapter will explore the representation of the Yes Men in the media coverage they gained, and the identity that developed around them as a result of press coverage, and the media they create themselves. Chapter 5 will analyze the concept of ―identity correction‖ and its place within the construction of identity in contemporary society for corporate organizations as well as the resistance group of the Yes Men. Chapter 6 will venture into the actual acts of ―identity correction‖ and the success or failure they achieve as an intended ―image event.‖ Chapter 7 will investigate the entertainment value versus the social movement value in the projects of the Yes Men, and will allow me to reach a conclusion where I will synthesize and surmise what has been learned, address future possibilities for this form of activism, and contemplate what will need to be learned further as the fight moves into the twenty-fist century. I hope to see you there.

5 This is somewhat related to what Naomi Klein calls ―designer activism,‖ which is a tendency for people to get outraged to a greater degree over issues that have a brand name connected to them, such as Wal-Mart, Starbucks, or McDonalds. Whereas other issues that are just as outrageous are ignored because they do not have a brand name attached. 23

CHAPTER 4

REPRESNTATION

Introduction

As I undertake this process of ‗understanding‘ the Yes Men, I am moving toward constructing a certain meaning that enables us to meaningfully conceptualize the Yes Men in their social, cultural, and political role (Du Gay, et al., 1997). I will move beyond a simplistic definition by description, and pay particular attention to their significance as a product of culture.

‗Culture,‘ however, is an important term that does not allow me to simply make mention of and move on. It is term that refers to the conditions of our common life, and one that must have some definition in order to continue. Already, this thesis has made extensive use of the terms ‗culture jamming‘ and ‗cultural studies,‘ however; I have done so without a substantive outlining of the term culture. Culture is the whole of society‘s beliefs, knowledge, and practices (Wright). It is everything from the shoes we wear to the spaceships we fly to Mars and beyond; from the Mona Lisa, to Mozart, to the Sex Pistols; from how you prepare your dinner, to how you worship your God; and it is all of our technologies from the harnessing of fire to the World Wide Web. The manifestation of cultural beliefs, knowledge, and practices may vary from person to household to community and beyond, but the fact that we learn beyond the instincts we are born with is a result of our contact with culture.

Culture, then, is the ―medium of information‖ (Grossberg, p. 20), which provides knowledge that is not innate to us. It is ―the agency by which the chaos of reality is transformed into the ordered sense of human reality‖ (ibid.). Not having culture with which to define our reality would leave us adrift amid confusion. One definition that I find particularly germane is provided by Raymond Williams, ―culture is a description of a particular way of life which expresses certain meanings and values not only in art and learning but also in institutions and ordinary behavior‖ (quoted in Du Gay et al., p. 12). Culture, then is indelibly linked to the role of meaning in society, and the existence of culture generates the need for intellectual exercises that deliver better understandings of the circuitry that makes up our cultural machine.

In their study of the Sony Walkman, Du Gay, et al. (1997), have illustrated a model through which we can enter into the work of better understanding our culture. In their book, Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman, they introduce the circuit of culture, which identifies the five major cultural process ―through which any analysis of a cultural text or artifact must pass if it is to be adequately studied‖ (p. 3): representation, identity, production, consumption, and regulation.

24

As I progress through my chosen points on the circuit, I will expand on the individual intersections as I enter into each discussion. This chapter will deal with the representation of the Yes Men. Representation amounts to the shared knowledge and frameworks of meaning which we use to ―place and understand things, to ‗make sense‘ of the world, to formulate and communicate or exchange ideas and meanings‖ (ibid., p.8-10). The representation point in the circuit is the point from which meaning gets delivered, which makes delivered closely synonymous with representation. For example, the knowledge that convenes around the Yes Men does not come directly from them, but from the way in which they are represented/delivered to us in oral and visual language. (Read the sentence twice using one term each time.) In order to gain a sense of the language that represents the Yes Men this section will analyze how the Yes Men have been represented/delivered in media coverage, which leads me to the concept of framing.

As individuals, we can only experience so much through first hand observation. Thus, we are reliant on arbiters of information to help us make sense of what occurs outside our area of social life. We rely on elected officials to govern and make laws, we rely on farmers to grow our food, we rely on manufactures to make our products, and we rely on the media to keep us informed about these things and more. As Todd Gitlin puts it, ―of all the institutions of daily life, the media specialize in orchestrating everyday consciousness‖ (p. 2). This premise is important to activists on the global stage because they are not as well equipped to disseminate their issues of concern, to the general public, as the mass media is. Further, it is ―the power of the media to represent dissent, shaping our collective conscious and attitudes toward political issues‖ (Opel, A. & Pompper, D., p. xii), that must be examined in order for us to understand the intersection between activists and media. Towards that end, I will construct an analysis of the representations of the Yes Men in large-scale media.

In today‘s media-rich environment, according to Todd Gitlin, ―political movements feel called upon to rely on large-scale communications in order to matter, to say who they are and what they intend to publics they want to sway; but in the process they become ‗newsworthy‘ only by submitting to the implicit rules of news making, by conforming to journalistic notions (themselves

25

embedded in history) of what a ‗story‘ is, what an ‗event‘ is, what a ‗protest‘ is (p. 3).

Gitlin is pointing out that activists are reliant upon dominant media structure to construct definitions of themselves and the significance of their movement. This concept is commonly called framing, which is a media device that ―makes the world beyond experience look natural‖ (Gitlin, p. 6), or an arrangement of themes concerning a news story that develops a coherent whole to suggest what is at issue (Rodriguez). Thus, simply because a movement has a specific message to get across to the public does not mean that the large-scale media will communicate it in a satisfactory way. As the above quote highlights, movements must gear themselves toward the frames that news organizations adhere to.

The big picture here, as was mentioned with the Situationist notion of Spectacle, that dominant institutions benefit from the pacification of the masses and the control of information, leads me to the point that the mass media, through concentration of ownership and global expansion, is a legitimizing actor in the corporate control of information and culture6. According to Robert McChesney, ―the rise of a global commercial media system is closely linked to the rise of a significantly more integrated ‗neo-liberal‘ global capitalist economic system‖ (1998, p. 27). Thus, the mass media entities that are owned by multi-national conglomerates act as an arm that pushes for the interests they serve, namely the global expansion of the market based system.

The institutionalized nature of the news media is not overtly obvious, but it is something that has been closely analyzed (e.g. Chomsky, 2002; Gitlin, 1989; Jhally, 1989; Schiller, 1989). Of course, news media outlets do not serve as outright propaganda machines for corporate ownership interests but they are, however, increasingly drawn into the fold of making money and being a profitable enterprise, which is often manifested in choosing news frames that that enhance profitability. Also, in times of crisis they can be counted on to maintain the status quo, and toe the line of ownership interests.

This being the case, when activists seek to challenge the global market-based system, they place themselves at the will of the major media apparatuses in order to get their message out to the broad public, and the message the activists would prefer may often be different from the message that makes a news story or event. For example, global justice activists and protest groups may have a direct message about the global order, but the news media focus coverage on the gathering, or the costumes, or the isolated instances of mayhem that break out. In this respect, they are reliant upon the frames that they are cast in, and are often diluted to the point that the message concerns the act of resistance rather than the goal behind it. Or, to put it another way they focus on the tactics rather than the overall strategy and message. Going back to Todd Gitlin, he writes, this happens because ―frames are principles of selection, emphasis, and presentation composed of little tacit theories about what exists, what happens, and what matters‖ (p. 6), and when ‗what matters‘ is not easily framed and organized, it remains marginalized by

6 This has been pointed out more times than I can possibly be aware of, but my understanding came from a graduate seminar, Global Media and Culture, under the instruction of Greg Elmer. One of the readings being the anthology Electronic Empires: Global Media and Local Resistance, edited by D.K. Thussu. Particularly the chapters ―Striving for Communication Dominance: A Half Century Review,‖ by H.I. Schiller; and ―Media Convergence and Globalization,‖ by R.W. McChesney. 26 these journalistic practices.

This brings me further back to Manuel Castells‘ concept of legitimizing identity (2004). Legitimizing identity occurs when ―dominant institutions of society extend and rationalize their domination vis à vis social actors‖ (p. 8), and I contend that framing in the news media is an instance of what Castells has in mind with this concept. Because the media is becoming global in nature and corporate in character, its framing process will act as one of the dominant institutions that play a major role in delivering meaning and representing the Yes Men.

For these reasons, we must ask certain questions when faced with relying upon media frames to explain aspects of our culture that are not directly observable. The questions I ask are, what are the frames concerning the Yes Men, and their actions? Do the framing techniques allow for the message of the Yes Men’s overall strategy, or are they simply viewed via the tactics and hoaxes they utilize? And lastly, are they subjected to Castells’ concept of a legitimizing identity constructed by a dominant institutional framework of large-scale media? I.e., are the news frames constructed in such a manner that they rationalize sources of structural domination at the point in which they define oppositional or resistant forces?

A Brief Addendum to Methodology

The basic methodology employed here begins with a frame analysis7 aimed at pulling out the significant language, common frames, and organizing ideas used to represent the Yes Men in contemporary discourse. I will pay particular attention to descriptive phrases, comparisons made to other cultural actors, and the tone utilized in the description of their tactics. Once I have constructed the particular news frames that the Yes Men are subjected to, I will offer a deeper cultural reading as to how the particular news frames are encoded/decoded through particular cultural codes, a la Stuart Hall and the work of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS)8. The encoding/decoding analysis will be geared toward wider structures, and wider themes that produce meaning, or culture itself. This will assist me in making my final point, for this chapter, that through these processes we can draw out a larger cultural meaning about the social and political structures that frame and enable the production of meaning. In this case it can be observed in the legitimizing identity construction the Yes Men are subjected to through the ways they are represented culturally.

The unit of analysis is sixty-two mainstream newspaper articles I obtained through a set collected on the Yes Men‘s website (www.theyesmen.org), a LexisNexis Academic database search using the terms ―yes men,‖ ―Mike Bonanno,‖ and ―Andy Bichlbaum,‖ as well as a Google News search using the same terms. I feel this serves as a near comprehensive list of articles concerning the Yes Men, in publications with large scale and diverse circulation. The time span for both searches extended from June 1, 2000 to January 1, 2006. These dates were chosen because, June

7 The analysis will be conducted by referring to prior and analysis conducted by, Stuart Hall, in ―The Determinations of News Photographs‖ (1973); Gaye Tuchman, in Making News (1978); Todd Gitlin in The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the (1989); and Illia Rodriguez, in ―Mapping the Emerging Global Order in News Discourse: The Meanings of Globalization in News Magazines in the Early 1990s‖ (2003). 8 This work is well illustrated and thoroughly documented in, British Cultural Studies: An Introduction (1996), by Graeme Turner. 27 of 2000 marks the date of their first appearance posing as representatives of the WTO in Vienna, Austria. The January 1, 2006 was chosen simply as a cutoff date in order to begin the analysis. The Yes Men acted prior to the Vienna appearance, by impersonating George W. Bush‘s official campaign website in 1999. The coverage, however, was sparse because the Yes Men did not publicly announce they were behind the website. Also, I am choosing a research frame that concerns the globalization and global justice debate.

The Yes Men Get Framed

The tactical goal of the Yes Men, in the projects they carry out, is to get some sort of media coverage. They do what they do, in the way that they do it, because it is an avenue to make their arguments about global justice newsworthy. However, in the process they must accept the reality that they will be represented in particular news frames that serve the interest of a daily news agenda. As will be shown, they run into difficulty finding form for particular arguments of substance, and are often portrayed as meddlesome, brazen pranksters that would just as easily show up at an MTV sponsored Spring Break as they would at the meetings of the WTO, IMF, World Bank, etc.

Over and over the primary depictions of the Yes Men in the press coverage I have analyzed is that they have an ―anti-corporate,‖ ―anti-globalization‖ political stance that they display by acting out in defiant and mischievous ways. They are commonly referred to as ―political pranksters,‖ ―activist pranksters,‖ ―media pranksters,‖ ―anti-globalization pranksters,‖ ―anti- corporate pranksters,‖ and sometimes, the ―prankster duo.‖ The signifier may change, but the ‗prankster‘ description remains very consistent from outlet to outlet. Undoubtedly, this is a partial a result of United Artist‘s (the distributor of The Yes Men, the movie) tagline for the film, ―changing the world one prank at a time,‖ but not completely as many of the article dates precede the release of the film.

Often the resulting frames are incongruous with the seriousness of the issues the Yes Men are trying to address. They tend to come off as ―artists‖ or ―actors‖ or simply a ―fun to watch duo‖ that happen to have a message somewhere behind the playful antics. This is largely because, an obvious majority of press coverage comes from attention to the film (62 percent), and they are initially reacted to as pop-icons and reviewable characters, not political activists dealing with critical issues. More often than not, when the message is discussed, it is referred to as ―anti- corporate‖ or ―anti-globalization,‖ with little further discussion, and being that many of the articles are designed to review the movie, not cover the Yes Men, they are not expected to open up a broad debate on global issues. However, the point remains that the Yes Men‘s purpose is political not entertainment, and they are most recognizable as being the subject of a film designed for entertainment. These news frames reveals the difficulty of using ―entertainment‖ strategies to address political issues, and the Yes Men are a good example of this dynamic.

Most press coverage is about the film, and thus, describes them from scenes in the film, but they have been given opportunity to speak in their own words in particular interviews, which I will address below. When they are allotted space for their own words they manage to touch on broad themes such as global poverty and corporate excess, but more often than not, they are questioned about the making of the pranks and the methods behind them. This points to news media‘s

28 tendency to frame them as the crafters of elaborate jokes or actors putting on a play in odd circumstances. Their message about global injustice is secondary to them being identified as pranksters. Such classifications are a slight to the resistance purpose of the Yes Men, and a boon to the status-quo position of dominant institutions. Playing up the meddlesome-mischievous- prankster, and playing down the politically charged activist, denies the Yes Men their strategic message in favor of their tactical methods. This serves to present the ‗prankster‘ angle in the news frames as the dominant point of reference. It also shows these methods of culture jamming to be more tactically successful than strategically successful.

When they are successful in getting a broad message out concerning global justice issues, they do it in a manner that lends itself to sound bites and quotable phases. Again and again, they turn to the phrase ―identity-correction,‖ and its characterization of being an act to show corporations and corporate interests in a more honest light. The use of the ―identity-correction‖ concept sets them in a more serious light beyond being simply pranksters. It offers a method to the madness they are often characterized as being involved in. It shows them to have a plan and a purpose beyond having fun at the expense of corporate and global elites. When the subject is touched upon, the ―identity-correction‖ topic highlights the intentions of the Yes Men in a manner that fits well into the news frames, and it is often a topic the journalists pick up on themselves, because it is displayed prominently on the Yes Men‘s web site.

A fair amount of coverage did turn to the Yes Men to get their comments, but with the exception of a couple radio interviews (with Dave Davies on NPR‘s Fresh Air, and Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!) the coverage continued to focus mainly on the preparation and tactical methods that went into the projects, along with the reoccurring explanation of identity- correction. The fact that media tends to frame the Yes Men as joke artists and playful pranksters corners them into being seen as fixated on adolescent hijinks rather than sophisticated political thought. Thus, we see the importance of mechanics over message when they enter into the den of the beast to carry out their political actions, they emerge relegated to conveying the message of how they got in rather than what the purpose was for going in in the first place.

I feel that the one time in which the Yes Men have been successful in manipulating the news frames they are cast in was in the case of the so-called Bhopal incident. The Bhopal incident refers the invite they received, via their on-line impersonation of Dow Chemical, to appear on the BBC to discuss the twentieth anniversary of the Union Carbide chemical disaster in Bhopal, India. In this case Bichlbaum and Bonanno were interviewed seven times in the week following the incident, and were able to deliver a more direct message as to why they do what they do, not simply how they do what they do. They found the opportunity to address issues such as the number of people killed and suffering life-long illness, the extent to which Dow had addressed the issue, and the blatant defiance on the part of Dow to do anything further. In this case, because they were the subject of interviews, Bichlbaum and Bonanno themselves were able to develop the frame of the story in a more participatory manner. Not once, in the week‘s worth of stories following the BBC appearance, were they called pranksters! They were deemed ―practitioners of an elaborate hoax,‖ ―satirists‖ in the tradition of ―Jonathan Swift‖ or ―Daniel Defoe,‖ ―subverters and underminers of global corporations,‖ and ―notorious and well-meaning.‖ Granted, much of this may be attributed to the fact that of the seven major news organizations that covered the story to any extent, only two were from the United States (Democracy Now!,

29 and the Times-Union in Albany, New York), and the news frames in the British and Indian press tend to be more geared toward hard news rather than entertaining news. Nonetheless, in the coverage surrounding this incident the Yes Men were portrayed in a more sophisticated light than in much of the coverage in the United States that focused primarily on the film.

Another possible reason for the sophistication of description, in the Bhopal case, may be that because the press itself, namely the BBC, was the brunt of the hoax, it was taken more seriously. The institution of the press was duped in this instance, and it may have been an intrinsic reaction to see it as a more serious offense that earned a deeper discussion, rather than something that was allegory to a practical joke. Notably, this time it was a ‗hoax‘ rather than a ‗prank.‘ A hoax has a slightly more ominous tone, and thus a more sophisticated tone than prank. A prank is a mischievous trick intended for fun, whereas a hoax is something intended to deceive or a serious fraud9. The word choice is obviously intentional because the separation of terms is clear in the coverage. When the subject is the exploits against the WTO or the film, the Yes Men are marked as pranksters, but when the media became part of the story, the frame switched to a hoax.

There are more enlightening reasons for the frame choices that I will attend to below, but I wanted to take the previous pages to lay out the particular frames through which we observe and read the Yes Men. The ultimate point of reference, or primary frame, is that they impersonate targets for reasons that connect to the anti-corporate and anti-globalization movements. How those impersonations are characterized is secondary within the frame. This refers to the choice between pranksters and hoaxers, as well as how much information the Yes Men are able to convey about their global justice concerns. More often than not the Yes Men are characterized as pranksters, and as a result the coverage is geared toward an infatuation with how the pranks are carried out, and with little attention as to why they are carried out. Only when they are characterized a hoax do we see the coverage dig deeper and try to understand what the deception was aimed at in the first place. It all goes back to the fact that pranks are for fun, so the frame concentrates on the acts that create the fun, and hoaxes are intended to deceive, so the frame must also look for the reality or truth behind the deception.

Who Framed The Yes Men?

The larger dimension at issue here is how do these frames connect to larger narrative structures within cultural discourses? Earlier in this chapter, I asked are the news frames constructed in such a manner that they rationalize sources of structural domination at the point in which they define oppositional or resistant forces? Or more specifically, are they subjected to Manuel Castells’ concept of a legitimizing identity constructed by a dominant institutional framework of large-scale media? In this final section of Chapter 4, I will rely on Castells‘ concept of legitimizing identity, and Stuart Hall‘s methodology of encoding/decoding to provide answers to these questions.

To reiterate and expand upon what I have previously noted, ―legitimizing identity generates a civil society; that is, a set of organizations and institutions, as well as a series of structured and

9 This linguistic parsing comes from looking up the two words in my American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (1969). 30 organized social actors, which reproduce, albeit sometimes in a conflictive manner, the identity that rationalizes the sources of structural domination‖ (Castells, p. 8). This is rooted in Gramsci‘s notion that ―civil society is formed by a series of ‗apparatuses,‘ such as the Church(es), unions, parties, , civic associations, and so on, which, on the one hand, prolong the dynamics of the state, but, on the other hand, are deeply rooted among the people‖ (ibid., p. 8-9). The media are one of these so-called ―apparatuses,‖ and via this concept, as I will explain that the Yes Men are subjected to a legitimized identity through the way in which they are represented.

I will explain this by borrowing form the methods of Stuart Hall‘s encoding/decoding analysis. Hall emphasized that ―the production and the consumption of messages are overdetermined by a range of influences, including the discourses of the medium, the discursive context in which the consumption takes place, and the technologies used to carry the message‖ (Turner, p.83). I will be focusing on the discourse of the medium (for instance, the use of particular terms), and the discursive context (the frames of the news stories about the Yes Men illustrated above).

It is important that Hall has noted receivers of messages are not homogeneous, there are many different groups and interests, but there are certain conventions that limit interpretation. This results from our communication systems encoding our language in advance. The primary encoding occurring in the framing of the Yes Men is that of them being pranksters, and thus the frames through which they are portrayed are highly attentive to the tactics they employ, and neglectful of their larger issues of concern. I cannot speak to the intention of individual journalists creating the frames through which the Yes Men are represented, but I can speak to the resulting codes that manifest as possible ‗preferred‘ readings.

A preferred reading is an imposed classification of the social, cultural, and political world. The imposition comes from the coding that communication apparatuses have developed over time. These readings, while theoretically possible, are rare, because while one may accept the dominant definition, we reserve the right to ―make a more negotiated application to local conditions‖ (ibid., p. 86). Thus, while meaning is constantly negotiated by each and every one of us, it initiates from a well of culturally and socially defined meaning. It is important to note, however, that any textual analysis is left open to outside interpretation, but dominant cultural themes can be explained and explored, and I will explain and explore the cultural meaning of the faming of the Yes Men: the hoax vs. the prank, and how that enters into our cultural representation as to who the Yes Men are.

My argument is that the framing of the Yes Men as pranksters allows for their social, political, and cultural intentions to be smoothed over in favor of a more congenial definition that represents them not as serious challengers to the status-quo, but rather as a meddlesome thorn in the side of the inevitability of globalization and corporate dominance. This follows a trend in ―corporatized news media‖ reporting on issues of globalization that has ―focused almost exclusively on the spectacle…meanwhile, the substantive issues raised by street activists have received little or no mainstream news media attention‖ (Opel & Pompper, p. xii).

It also speaks to the many critiques levied against the news media that substantive issues often take a back seat to easily explainable and definable news frames that lean more toward

31 entertainment than substance. This is highlighted in the coverage of the Yes Men by the repeated comparisons to pranking entertainers such as MTV‘s group Jackass, and HBO‘s masquerading journalist G. By choosing these descriptives, the journalists who do so are ignoring the purpose behind the prank, presumably because exposing the negative impact of globalization is a context that maximizes the efforts of explanation rather than minimizes them. In twenty-four hour news cycles, competition for audience shares, and the need to quickly and easily relate a news story to the reading public, the construction of news frames is often geared toward language and references that have been coded for us in advance. Globalization, global justice, fair-trade, and other issues that are still relatively new to a twenty-first century news audience require some effort in defining. Jackass, Ali G, and practical jokes however are easily referenced and, to many, they may even be more interesting.

As I quoted earlier from Todd Gitlin, ― the media specialize in orchestrating our everyday consciousness,‖ and as such, when they align the Yes Men more closely to Jackass and Ali G, than to serious defenders of global justice, such as Lori Wallach or Naomi Klein, they are doing an injustice of their own by introducing the Yes Men‘s voice of global concern in such a way that devotes minimal effort into expanding our ―everyday consciousness.‖ The media, in this case, are reluctant to open up new frames of discussion because the cultural codes that are necessary for such discussion complicate matters to a degree that involves engaging in discourses that may be unfamiliar to large portions of the general public.

The act of the corporatized media dulling the image of the Yes Men as global justice activists, and highlighting the prankster angle serves as an example of a legitimized identity. The coding of cultural discourse that defines the Yes Men as social actors rationalizes them as part of a mischievous youth culture rebelling against sophisticated elders of a dominant, global, market- based structure. Their global justice arguments are largely ignored and the destructiveness of the economic organizations that they oppose is faintly addressed. The situation is comparable to a child‘s opinion when dealing with a room full of adults. Regardless of the substance of the argument, the mischievous voice of youth is disregarded because the elders have their minds made up and there is little point in redressing what is already in place.

The media best serve the Yes Men when the hoax was taken directly to the media, and the media was forced to discover the truth behind the deception. In these instances, the Yes Men had greater opportunities to speak for themselves, and develop their arguments in a more sophisticated and comprehensive manner. When the story forces the media to come directly to the Yes Men, because a false news item must be recounted, Bichlbaum and Bonanno managed to engage in deeper more complex frames about global justice.

Therefore, when it is the goal of the Yes Men to achieve media coverage, their arguments find greater traction when the tactic is a hoax aimed to deceive, rather than a prank intended as a joke, at least when dealing with media representations. This echoes the point that I noted in the literature review, made by Christine Harold, that Guy DeBord and the Situationists were ―decidedly opposed to parody as an effective rhetorical strategy, because it maintained, rather than unsettled, audiences‘ purchase of the truth‖ (p. 192). The same thing occurs in the media when the pranks of the Yes Men get covered in comparison to the hoaxes. The pranks simply remind us how powerful the WTO, the IMF, and other organizations are by highlighting the silly

32 actions of the Yes Men, ignoring their serious arguments, and allowing the targets of the WTO, the IMF, etc., to exist without any real questions being asked. In other words, through mischievous tricks against the WTO, etc. they are forgiven or legitimized in their departure from the norm and regarded as calculated alterations, which serve to confirm the validity of the system. On the other hand, when the hoax is utilized against the media, it forces journalists to go to the source and seek out the truth. At that point the Yes Men gained more opportunities to speak for themselves, and more importantly explain themselves and the issues they stand for, rather than explain what they did.

The media limiting the arguments of the Yes Men, and focusing on their tactics serves to represent them more as a force of mischief, than as a force of resistance, thereby legitimizing their resistance qualities to a broad audience by categorizing them as entertaining. In this sense it is difficult for the Yes Men to achieve broad success in this one aspect of their role in the fight for global justice. The Yes Men are not going to get a windfall of success from their representation in the media, because they are subjected to legitimizing forces that limit the possibilities. However, as a product of culture, the way in which they are represented in the media does not tell the whole story. In the next chapter I will move deeper into exploring the identity of the group, and the other fronts they face in the battle of resistance.

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CHAPTER 5

IDENTITY

Where there is domination there is resistance to domination; where new forms of domination emerge, new forms of resistance ultimately surge to act upon the specific patterns of domination. M. Castells, The Power of Identity (p.147, 2004)

Introduction

Who are the Yes Men? The simple answer is that they are Andy Bichlbaum, Mike Bonanno, and a global network of friends and accomplices involved in the global justice movement. However, beyond a couple of names and a vague description of broader contacts and motivations this information tells us little as to their meaning and purpose, or how they came to develop them. What needs to be answered beyond names and faces is the uncertainty of their political and cultural identity, what Lawrence Grossberg calls ―the problem of identity‖ (1997, p.356). Borrowing from Stuart Hall, Grossberg points out that there are two ways to answer questions about the struggle over or the production of identities. The first, ―assumes that there is some intrinsic and essential content to any identity which is defined by either a common origin or a common structure of experience or both‖ (Grossberg, 1997, p. 356). This model of struggle contests negative images with positive ones and attempts to discover ―the ‗authentic‘ and ‗original‘ content of the identity‖ (ibid., pp.356-357). Essentially, this model suggests that a representational struggle takes place in the form of offering ―one fully constituted, separate, and distinct identity in place of another‖ (ibid.), and assumes that an old concept is erased in favor of a new one. In certain ways, the attempts at identity-correction (which I will discuss below) that the Yes Men utilize are an example of this type of struggle of meaning.

The second model questions and ―emphasizes the impossibility of such fully constituted, separate, and distinct identities‖ (ibid. 357), in a postmodern perspective that might question the notion of a fixed identity. The model dismisses the possibility of authentic and original identities built upon a shared experience, and denies that the core of the self remains the same across time, but rather is always in the process of change and transformation. For Hall, ―the concept of identity…is therefore not an essentialist, but a strategic and positional one‖ (1996, p.3). Thus, identity is not a concept we look to for a definition of a stable core or unchanging meaning. It is better understood as ―fragmented and fractured,‖ and ―constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic, discourses, practices, and positions‖ (ibid., p. 4) that are constantly in the process of change and transformation. The second model is an illustration of the politics that many activists and opponents of the global order must work within as disparate groups bring single-issue concerns into the multi-issue theater of the global justice movement. The internal diversity of the networks that surround the global justice movement forbid a simple, unified characterization of its values and goals, and thus requires the second of Hall‘s models to answer the questions of identity. After a brief account of the concept of identity including corporate branding and identity politics, I will explore how we can better understand the meanings and purpose of the Yes Men and how they are identified as part of the global justice movement.

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Going back to the seventeenth century for some context, the French philosopher Descartes assumed identity existed as an independent source of meaning and agency as the self or the subject (Kellner, 2003; Edgar, 1999). Descartes‘ work argued that the individual existed as an ―autonomous subject sure of its own identity‖ (Edgar, 184), questioning everything other than the fact that he or she exists, as the self. However, Scottish philosopher David Hume came along to question even the self. Hume observed a ―bundle of sensations‖ (Kellner, p. 111) that he could recognize as the contents of his consciousness that included images of everything he was thinking, but ―there was though, no image of the self that was supposedly doing this perceiving and remembering‖ (Edgar, p. 184). The revelation came to be called Hume‘s ‗bundle theory‘ of the self, which held that ―the self is nothing more than a bundle of sense impressions that continually changes as the individual had new experiences or recalled old ones‖ (ibid.).

Emile Durkhiem‘s further consideration of the concept, in the late nineteenth century, argued that the individual was the product of society, and (not that society was a product of individuals), and pointed out that ―a modern understanding of individuality was a product of that particular culture‖ (ibid.). Thus, identities came to be understood as positioned in relation to the culture within which they existed. The concepts of Durkhiem have stuck for the most part and have been carried along in to the twentieth century by the likes of Althusser and Foucault. Althusser argued that ―social institutions such as the church, education, police, family, and mass media ‗interpellate‘ or hail the subject, again positioning him or her in society‖ (ibid., p. 186). Foucault, as well, has characteristically observed the effects of surroundings and discourse on the individual in his work on the social mechanisms of power such as the clinic, prisons, and discourses of sexuality among others (The Birth of the Clinic, Madness and Civilization, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, and The History of Sexuality). Thus, identity came to be understood as a socially constructed phenomenon, not an intrinsic or essential characteristic seen as authentic or original. The social dimensions that acted to construct identities were subject to change as well, and became evident in the in the expansion of media forms and identity politics.

Identity and politics The 1960s witnessed political struggle within the category of identity as ―individuals searching the history of their affiliated social groups‖ (Kellner, p. 111) discovered their cultural identities (i.e. African Americans, Chicanos, gays and lesbians, women, and so on). These new political affiliations recognized that identity of oppressed groups could be linked with movements promoting their interests, and ―open[ed] up theoretical space for marginal or oppressed groups to challenge and re-negotiate the identities that [had] been forced upon them in the process of domination‖ (Edgar, p. 187). The new allegiances were in contrast to previous periods when people constructed identity through closer more personal ties such as family, church groups, local community organizations, work, and political (Kellner). New movements linked individuals and groups from near and far and constituted themselves out of difference to other forces in politics, society, and culture.

Along with the new cultural affiliations of the 1960s we have seen an increased influence on culture by media. New forms of media have exposed us to expanded experiences that have led to a shift in political affiliations. Individuals have increasingly been able to identify with groups,

35 causes, issues, and struggles through the media, and thus new formations of identity have spread through culture in the form of ―feminist, gay and lesbian, conservative white male, militia, environmentalist, anti-globalization activist, and other figures generated by social movements and conflicts‖ (Kellner, p. 111). The new formations of identity, through cultural and media influence, have led to a new definition of politics, identity politics, which has expanded the concept of political struggle beyond the politics of the state and into the realms of everyday life, culture, and identity. This redefinition served to attach personal identity with ―ethnicity, gender, sexuality, history, culture, and the whole register of society and history‖ (ibid.). As a consequence, identity politics emerged in response to individuals and groups being subjected to oppression and judged to be inferior on the basis of what Kellner calls ‗identity markers,‘ or the color of skin gender, race, sexuality, and so on.

The Yes Men however, have to be viewed through the lens of identity politics in their own unique way. Rather than fighting oppression through exposure of how subjects are oppressed, they confront the identity of who they deem to be the oppressors and how those groups and institutions represent themselves. The politics of the Yes Men are not designed in a manner that speaks for a particular identity group, but rather speaks against the power of organizations like the WTO. They take on those who they feel portray a false identity, and they move to correct it. The practice is a particular method that the Yes Men call ―identity-correction,‖ in which they find ―people and institutions doing horrible things at everyone‘s expense, and assume their identities in order to offer correctives. Instead of identity theft, identity correction‖ (The Yes Men, p. 11). By highlighting the misconduct of these people and institutions, the Yes Men believe they can engage a debate that highlights the injustices committed by the targets that they strike at. The Yes Men have designs to be a lever of social change, hoping they can change people‘s minds and will.

This chapter will go on to engage the context within which the Yes Men construct, negotiate, and defend their politics that are entrenched in a stance of resistance against the corporate identities that they have targeted for correction. The approach holds that the identity of the Yes Men is a response to something external and different from it (an other), in this particular case, the institution of the corporation and supportive organizations. The struggle that the Yes Men are engaged in is one over representation, while the tactic of identity-correction questions how identities are produced and taken up through practices of representation.

Crystallizing the Method

In the following pages, I will delve into the origins and constructs of the resistance identity of the Yes Men. Castells‘ (2004) concept of resistance identity is defined as being ―generated by those actors who are in positions/conditions devalued and/or stigmatized by the logic of domination, thus building trenches of resistance and survival on the basis of principles different from, or opposed to, those permeating institutions of society‖ (2004, p. 8). I will show that the Yes Men act as one of these generating actors as they oppose the institution of the corporation and the values it has disseminated throughout society. As pointed out in Chapter 4, the Yes Men are often referred to, and often refer to themselves as ‗anti-corporate‘ or ‗anti-globalization‘ activists. This terminology places them in dialectic opposition to the corporate structure and the global dominance of corporate philosophies and values. I plan to illustrate that the devalued and

36 stigmatized position of actors of resistance, in a society highly influenced and politically managed by corporate values and the goal of achieving capital, answers the questions about the meaning and purpose of the identity of the Yes Men.

First, in order for a resistance identity to be formed there must an ‗other,‘ or a dominating system of power in the equation to resist against. In the Yes Men‘s case their opposition is aimed at a specific brand of globalization driven by the institution of the corporation and the value system it has spread throughout our culture(s) via its principles and branded identities. I will need to put a finger on the system that provokes resistance of actors such as the Yes Men, so, in the following section I will take a brief moment to highlight particular details about the institution of the corporation and its character (identity) that are germane to activist and resistance groups such as, but not exclusive to, the Yes Men. I will not be focusing on the ills or misdeeds of particular corporations10, but rather I will focus on the attempts that the institution of the corporation has made, over time, to grab power, or more precisely to limit its liability and enhance its identity. By highlighting these aspects we can see some expression of the linkage in the power and resistance relationships between the Yes Men and their particular targets and societal goals.

„What‟s He Building in There?‟

What’s he building in there?/He’s hiding something from the rest of us/What’s he building?/We have the right to know. ―What‘s He Building?,‖ from Mule Variations (1999),by Tom Waits

There is only one course open to American political and economic statesmanship: the attempt to make a free-enterprise system work. Peter Drucker (1946), Concept of the Corporation

Corporate organization, limited liability, and the fourteenth amendment The institution of the corporation was born out of the industrial revolution, ushered in by Thomas Newcomen in 1712, and steadily maneuvered itself into the dominant institution it is today. Newcomen invented a steam-driven machine to pump water out of a coalmine, and make the extraction of easier, faster, and more profitable. Because of the importance of coal as an energy source, this advancement ignited large-scale industry in England and the United States that required significantly more capital investment than the existing organizational form of the partnership could provide because partnerships were limited to obtaining investments from the relatively few people who were engaged in running the business (Bakan). The organizational scheme of partnerships became too cumbersome for the needs of growing businesses, and it was quickly recognized that selling shares of a company to a public that was willing to invest could finance endeavors in a more wide-ranging and lucrative way. The shift from partnerships to corporate organization was the dawn of a new day for capital and for business. Corporate investment in shares of a company allowed the institution of the corporation to grow and rise

10 Many wonderful writers have documented the misdeeds of particular corporations, so much so that any attempt I to make here it would pale in comparison to the others. Just a brief list of contemporary examples that do a good job are Bakan, 2004; Klein, 1999; and Palast, 2004. 37 over the political, social, and cultural landscape by involving investors and stakeholders that are simply represented by capital not individual presence. As the corporation became more abstract and less easily tied to the men running the show, two significant moments occurred in respect to how the corporation is viewed by law and by citizens.

The first is the inscription of limited liability into the laws governing corporate procedure. This is one of the real genius strokes created by business leaders for capital investors. Early on the corporate model learned that it had to protect its capital investors, so the system of limited liability was introduced. Limited liability removed an investor from being personably liable if the company failed or met financial ruin by limiting liability to the amount they had invested. If a person bought X amount of shares in a company, then that person was immune to anything beyond X amount if the company went negative. Thus, the ―person‖ responsible, on the whole, for corporate missteps was not a person at all, but rather the institutionalized amalgam of the corporation, and the liability of individual investors was limited and safe from compounded economic loss (Bakan).

The second instance that strengthened the corporations place in society came about when corporate legal hawks took advantage of the rights the Fourteenth Amendment mandated for ―due process of law‖ and ―equal protection of the laws,‖ initially designed to protect feed slaves11. This legal wrangling carried out by astute corporate lawyers gave the institution of the corporation legal rights as a person that were initially intended for the disenfranchised and enslaved of society. By setting legal that the corporation was to be legally interpreted as a person the responsibility for social good and the legal punishments for social deviation fell on the shoulders of an abstract non-corporeal being: the corporation (Bakan).

Thus, the corporation spent its youth and adolescence organizing into a corporate safety net for investors of capital. Through limited liability, investors could not be held responsible for any debts the corporation may accrue, and through manipulation of the Fourteenth Amendment business leaders relived themselves of any personal legal ramification that may come up in the process of making a buck, and violá!, the corporation today is everything free-market capital could ask for. Not only is it economically, politically, and legally able to act within bounds of massive freedoms and non-regulatory landscapes, but when misconduct does occur, the investors and the business leaders themselves are well equipped to avoid legal culpability, placing all responsibility on the corporate entity they created that was identifiable most notably by corporate name.

Brand identity Corporations, however, are not simply legal wranglers trying to find loophole after loophole to advance their situation. They are concerned with their identity, or more precisely their brand identity. Naomi Klein traces the enormous growth that has occurred over the past few decades for multinational corporations to one thing, the decision to ―produce brands, not products‖ (p. 3). The brand is a corporation‘s identity, it encompasses a company‘s and its core meaning. Companies of the past were tied to production and material products, but the

11 The legal case that provided precedent for this to enter in to U.S. law was Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad in 1886. It is also important to note that between 1890 and 1910, ―business interests invoked the Fourteenth Amendment 288 times before the , compared to 19 times by African Americans‖ (Bakan, p. 172). 38 corporations of today are much more tied to their identity or their brand. Brands are not the products in the stores, they are ideas, values, and experiences that we are so familiar within our culture. Often, when we think of family time it involves NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, etc. Our social interactions come over a Starbucks latte or we meet at the neighborhood Applebee‘s, which are both the same in Miami as they are in Seattle. When we decorate our homes we go to Ikea, and if we want to browse through books about it ,why go to the library, the Barnes & Noble has all the books we need (plus, a Starbucks is there too!). These associations are the result of the ongoing attempt to completely brand our culture, because the more recognizable and identifiable a company‘s brand is the more successful they feel. In 1988 Phillip Morris bought Kraft for $12.6 billion—―six times what the company was worth on paper‖ (Klein, p. 7). The difference in price was because the brand identity of Kraft was deemed to be so valuable. This was the first time the market experienced a price value of those proportions placed on what amounted to a brand name. The corporations of the United States and around the world went in to a frenzy to inflate the worth, visibility, and identification of their brand names. The assumption was that while products were losing the distinguishable qualities (blue-jeans were blue-jeans, light-bulbs were light-bulbs) the brand identities attached were what was going to identify a company and sell in the market place. The companies and corporations of the world became convinced that they would survive only if they built themselves upon brand identities (Klein).

Political branding The boardrooms and creative divisions of the corporations building brands looked to make any connection and gain any edge they could, and many of those working in the eighties and nineties, being children of the sixties, were familiar with the rise and power of identity politics in their generation. Now however, the identity politics that flourished in the 1960s and 1970s as a of the contemporary order became a tool for the branding identities of the 1980s, 1990s and beyond. While pressing issues of pay equity, race relations, and sexual freedom were all serious movements of the sixties, marketers and branders recognized the influence of such movements and began to co-opt them as tools to sell their brands in the eighties. Identity politics began to feed the system that was selling the brands to us as consumers. Sexual and racial diversity became a selling point for the marketing machines of the nineties. Malcolm X and Che Guevara began showing up on baseball hats and T-shirts, Ellen Degeneres and other gay characters could be found on primetime TV, and Disney World began to celebrate Gay Day. These displays of diversity, however, were less as a result of political progress than financial promise. Companies had recognized a niche and took advantage of it.

These shifts in cultural consciousness that made corporations appear more open-minded towards diversity did not necessarily signal a shift in the priorities of corporations. What it did signal was recognition that the consumers they were targeting were more diverse. That leaves one to make up his or her own mind as to whether representation is enough in the current situation. Some feel that major media, advertising, and corporate acknowledgment is a step in the gradual shift of society toward equality for all, but others see it as simply a complementary gesture to the work that activists of the past have done by acknowledging that their voices have been heard, while their complete demands have not been met.

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The crucial point now that we sit at the beginning of a new millennium is to move beyond the acknowledgments identity politics gained toward the existence of racism, sexism, and environmental degradation, and to acknowledge the institutions, policies, and theories that lead to these issues we are so painfully aware of, and correct them. I do not want it to be misunderstood that I believe every corporate institution is racist, sexist, and environmentally destructive, but I do believe the system remains unbalanced for women and minorities, and puts profit before environmental protection and . Making the distinction here between the good, the bad, and the ugly corporations would require a lot of tedious clarification that I would just assume avoid. So, I ask that the reader to suspend your wandering mind about the goodness of your favorite companies, and recognize them as anomalies in a system that does not require them to take many of the civilized actions that decent companies choose to adopt.

Naomi Klein points out that, ―the basic demands of identity politics assumed an atmosphere of plenty. In the seventies and eighties, that plenty had existed and women and non-whites were able to battle over how the collective pie would be divided: would white men learn to share, or would they keep hogging it? In the representational politics of the New Economy nineties, however, women as well as men, and whites as well as people of color were now fighting their battles over a single shrinking piece of the pie—and consistently failing to ask what happened to the rest of it‖ (p. 122). I will now turn to these people and institutions that have all the pie, and the Yes Men who are asking ‗what happened to the rest of it?‘ The task the Yes Men have taken on, in this day and age, is not to highlight the oppressed, but rather to highlight the oppressors. Since the rise of identity politics in the sixties and long before that we have been aware of the fact that segments of society are being treated unfairly. Many would argue that while we recognize the ills of societies not enough has been done to correct those ills. Simply recognizing an issue is only one step. Now that the corporate institutions have created a climate that recognizes diversity, what needs to be achieved is the identification of the institutions that are suppressing the advancement to equality for diverse populations. The Yes Men as ―identity- correctors‖ are offering us a window into the boardrooms and backrooms of the economic elite, and playing a role in the growing anti-corporate global justice movement that is spreading throughout the world. What makes them unique is that, while they are not as visually powerful as thousands marching in the streets or as sophisticated as many think tank organizations devoted global justice, they build upon the representational achievements of past identity politics that were dedicated to the oppressed in order to highlight the current oppressive system by attacking the identity of the powerful in support of the powerless. The remainder of this chapter will examine the Yes Men as identity-correctors of global justice.

„I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together‟…they are the Yes Men See how they smile like pigs in a sty, see how they snied. ―I Am the Walrus,‖ from Magical Mystery Tour (1967), by The Beatles

The weird clownish forms get on the nerves of the Establishment. In the face of the gruesomely serious totality of institutionalized politics, , and laughing provocation become a necessary dimension of the new politics. An Essay on Liberation, H. Marcuse (1969)

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Activist groups such as the Yes Men take a large part of their identity from the resistant stance that they position themselves in against dominant institutions of society. The Yes Men exhibit that stance by morphing themselves into their chosen target. In the Yes Men‘s case particularly, resistance is aimed at economic elites such as the WTO, the IMF, corporations, and supportive governments that promote free-market, non-regulatory economic practices that serve to enhance profits of politically powerful corporations and result in devalued human realities, or as (1999) would say, ―Profit Over People.‖ Thus, the Yes Men have staked their ground and a large part of their identity on highlighting the architects of injustices that are too often unnoticed. They conduct their tactics through a methodological approach they call ―identity- correction.‖ Identity-correction is the basis of their resistance identity: ―the building of defensive identity in terms of dominant institutions/ideologies, reversing the value while reinforcing the boundary‖ (Castells, 2004, p. 9)12. The Yes Men try to reverse or correct the identity of dominant institutions first through impersonation as a means to gain access, and second through the expression of opposition, when the impersonation is exposed (most often in the media), as means to reverse the value of the dominant corporate identities.

The Yes Men have described themselves in various ways, and often in tongue-in-cheek or self- effacing terms. They have called themselves ―nobody‖ and ―downwardly-mobile middle- classers‖ (The Yes Men, p.7), but it seems that they use these terms to draw attention away from themselves as individuals or even as activists, and instead they attempt to make themselves most recognizable by the method of identity-correction that they employ. They describe the name, the Yes Men, in relation to a funhouse mirror that ―exaggerates your most hideous features,‖ and claim that is what they do by agreeing with people, but pushing their ideas to extremes (FAQ on the Yes Men website, www.theyesmen.org). They define being a ―Yes Man‖ in broad encompassing language that would include any person, man or woman, who is exposing ―the nastiness of evildoers,‖ and thus, they define being a Yes Man as anyone who practices identity- correction (ibid.).

Identity Correction: What is it? Where did it come from? Identity-correction, as the Yes Men put it, is the opposite of identity-theft. Identity-theft, probably familiar to most, has become commonplace now that we have become increasingly tied to modern technologies such as the in our daily transactions. The theft of an identity results from the interception by criminal minded individuals or groups that want to get personal information like a date of birth, a social security number, an address, credit card numbers, or any other personal information that might benefit someone trying to impersonate someone or something. Identity-correction can be boiled down to the same thing, but political issues rather than wealth or material items are the targets of the ‗corrections.‘ The act of identity-correction starts with seeking out an identity to target. Then, the correctors choose an identifiable characteristic or identity code that can be duplicated and will be trusted by unaware individuals. The corrections of the Yes Men generally involve setting up a web page that closely mirrors an official one of the target organization13. The final step is to carry out an impersonation of the

12 Also defined earlier as, ―generated by those actors who are in positions/conditions devalued and/or stigmatized by the logic of domination, thus building trenches of resistance and survival on the basis different from, or opposed to, those permeating the institutions of society‖ (Castells, 2004, p. 8). 13 The Yes Men use a program Reamweaver that copies a webpage and assigns it its own individual URL on which the user can change text and graphics as they see fit. They have done this for the WTO, at the Yes Men‘s URL 41 targeted organization for the benefit of an unsuspecting audience. The way it usually works for the Yes Men is that they receive emails to their sites mirroring the WTO or Dow Chemical requesting a representative from the official organizations to attend a meeting or conference, which the Yes Men accept and appear at instead. The difference between identity-correction and –theft is that in identity-theft the gains are usually monetary or material in some way, in identity- correction the gains are symbolic and abstract, as the goal is to introduce new ideas or overlooked facts.

Identity-theft and identity-correction have become valuable tactics, whichever the purpose, because identity itself is a valuable commodity. We can observe this value in the wave of identity politics, and the corporate allegiance to brand identity. In particular, for the Yes Men, identities built upon corporate values need correction because the corporate value system has emerged as such a powerful institution over the years. In the words of Peter Drucker, an avid supporter and early architect of the growth of the corporate institution, corporations ―must realize the basic beliefs of American society‖ (p. 140). The Yes Men have developed the act of identity- correction because many authors, thinkers, and business leaders have followed the path that Drucker has blazed with his arguments that the corporation may have social responsibilities, but they can only be catered to if those responsibilities do not impinge on the primary goal of ―efficient production‖ (ibid.). Drucker does not believe that the ―economic purpose of the corporation, efficient production, is to be subordinated to its social function‖ (ibid.), and consequently ―the corporation can only function as the representative social institution of our society if it can fulfill its social functions in a manner which strengthens it as an efficient producer‖ (ibid.). The Yes Men, however, argue the opposite and believe that ―governments and corporations [should] act responsibly, humanely, and in the interest of all people everywhere‖ (The Yes Men, p. 18). Because these two philosophies are oppositional, and corporations enjoy such a powerful position in society with access to media, government, and capital, the Yes Men have developed this counter tactic of identity-correction in order to offer their own views in through methods that they can succeed at.

The Yes Men‘s strategy behind identity-correction is conducted through real-world (and cyberworld) impersonations in order to reveal portions of the corporate identity that the public is unaware of, yet might find alarming. The task is to assume the identity of an organization such as the WTO or a company such as Dow Chemical in much the same way that a con artist a might impersonate a trustworthy person in order to dupe a victim. In the case of the Yes Men, however, they want to expose unseen information. This is a dicey game when the purpose of the ruse is to highlight some form of social justice or lack of it. Not only must one be willing to be dishonest and act as imposter when going face-to-face with ‗the enemy,‘ but also, it often results in duping the public or the media that one is trying to reveal a story to. However, the Yes Men do not feel as if the lying, or ―trickery‖ as they call it, is an unacceptable means to their end, or even that they are lying for that matter. On the Yes Men website, when asked ―Are you guys liars or what?,‖ they respond, ―We need to be devious in order to achieve a condition of honesty. This is very different from ‗,‘ where companies are devious in order to achieve a condition of real criminality, sometimes. But we certainly won‘t stoop to actual lying, despite what you might think‖ (www.yesmen/faq.org). This shows that the Yes Men have learned to take advantage of the non-regulated space of the Internet, and as such they do not have www.gatt.org, and for Dow Chemical at www.dowethics.org. 42 anyone to answer to. They can get away with choosing their own ‗truths‘ and deciding themselves what constitutes ‗actual lying,‘ as they themselves are the gatekeepers that determine how far those subjectivities are pushed. A Yes Men might argue that if you compare them to the reason they exist, i.e. their opponents or ‗others‘ (the WTO, IMF, large corporations, and so on), the lying that the Yes Men do is far less damaging than the political corruption, exploitation, and excessive greed that they point out in their targets.

Also, much of their deceit can be understood as part of the long traditions of impersonation and satire, which are far from being as socially and morally corrupt as lying. The Yes Men‘s tactics of identity-correction are carried out in the tradition of impersonation in theater and film and the satire of literature. To that end, they can be viewed more as theatrical spectacle than as confrontational tactics. They themselves note that they attend these conferences not to confront the people they are speaking to in the meetings, but rather to ―create public spectacles that in some way reveal something about our culture that is a profound problem‖ (Bonanno, The Yes Men movie). They design these spectacles in such a way that they expect will attract media attention, and then hope that the media attention will turn people on to the ideas of anti- globalization and related causes.

The Yes Men liken themselves to the Greek playwright Aristophanes who in his play The Knights, in 424 B.C dared to impersonate the tyrant Cleon. The play‘s first performance found Cleon in the front row to witness his own likeness lose a debate with a sausage vendor. Because Cleon, the military leader, was part of the audience and not part of the show he was unable to confront Aristophanes, the actors, or the ‗sausage vendor'(Schechter). The spectacle allowed Aristophanes the opportunity to debate his leader in public when it was otherwise impossible, in much the same way the Yes Men attempt to engage the reclusive WTO. The context of the play also guaranteed that Aristophanes would win the debate as the playwright provided both sides of the argument. The Yes Men are in the same privileged position as Aristophanes, because as they impersonate their targets, they are in their own ‗theater‘ of conferences and televised talk shows, standing in the place of those they are impersonating, and thus not threatened by any form of debate coming from their target. Also, the Yes Men likely feel justified in there impersonations being accepted corrections of identity rather than theft, because as sociologist Erving Goffman notes, ―We often feel differently about those who misrepresent themselves [as imposters] for what they feel are the just claims of the collectivity,…or for a lark, than about those who misrepresent themselves for private psychological or material gain‖ (quoted in Schechter, p. 9). In this sense the Yes Men take advantage the willingness of the public to accept impersonation as a tolerable form of lying, knowing it was done with good reason.

The Yes Men also point out that when audiences witness what is believed to be a figure of authority saying things contradictory to what his or her character is expected to represent, the surprising words can be heard as an improvement of character and the audience will take to it whole-heartedly. The example of the last scene in Charlie Chaplin‘s The Great Dictator is a good illustration. Mistaken for Hitler, Chaplin‘s character, a Jewish barber makes a speech for the soldiers waiting to join the Nazi party, in which he declares,

Greed has poisoned men‘s souls; has barricaded the world with hate; has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed…Even now

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my voice is reaching millions…victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people…Soldiers! Don‘t give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you and enslave you…Soldiers! Don‘t fight for slavery, fight for liberty.

In Chaplin‘s film the soldiers cheer and leave the Nazi party, because they trust the figure that they believe to be Hitler, and can agree with the sentiments of liberty and freedom. Yes, this is fiction and entertainment, but the Yes Men themselves feel that given the right opportunity they can be successful with a similar ruse (they have mentioned that their dream scenario would be to impersonate George W. Bush). They managed it once in Australia when they falsely shut down the WTO because, as they said in the presentation, it had undergone a reexamination of its policies and determined that it was not living up to serving the world‘s poor as it claimed (The Yes Men the movie, The Yes Men the book, pp. 157-168). After the speech the audience of free- trade agribusiness people offered strong support of the new direction that they believed the WTO had laid out even though it was far from any statements or remarks the WTO had made in the past because they trusted the authority of the WTO. These acts of impersonation locate the Yes Men as oppositional and resistant to the subjects they are impersonating through the contradictory information or text that they deliver to unsuspecting audiences.

The Yes Men see these acts of impersonation as theater and feel that, because they are putting on a show, such a perspective removes any personal concern about dishonesty. Their sense is that just because they are not within the walls of a theater-proper does not mean that they cannot put on an act and have it obscure the reality of their deceit. The theater has always been a mirror in which we see the true nature of reality, just as when Hamlet described what he wanted to his actors, ―to hold as ‗twere the mirror up to nature: to show virtue, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure‖ (Hamlet, Act III, Scene II).

The act of moving theater out of the theater in order to reveal the true nature of something is not without precedent either and relates to another similar theoretical concept that Yes Men identify themselves with: Augusto Boal‘s Theater of the Oppressed. Augusto Boal, in speaking of the Theater of the Oppressed, exclaimed that ―theater cannot be imprisoned inside theatrical buildings, just as cannot be imprisoned inside churches‖ (p. 19). Boal‘s Theater of the Oppressed transforms the spectator into the actor and rehearses scenes that could happen in real life in order to make audiences more aware of their surroundings. Boal has devised myriad uses for theater to be conducted amongst the world going on around it, but the most germane to the Yes Men is that of . Staged in public spaces and masquerading as everyday life, the theatrical scenarios address social issues and are designed to incite public dialogue among people who did not know that they were witnessing a planned theatrics (Schutzman, & Cohen- Cruz, p. 3). Similarly the Yes Men take the logic of market capitalism, and run through it to an extreme in front of audiences that they hope will get enraged and feel compelled to participate in debate. The audiences, however, are either completely disinterested, or taken in by the authority of the WTO and do not question or debate. The only time they have achieved debate, however, is in front of the students in Plattsburg, NY when The Yes Men proposed feeding the third world recycled MacDonald‘s hamburgers. The students at the university become enraged at the policies and ideas that the WTO representative is pushing on them and they fire back with angry questions and statements. From the Yes Men‘s perspective this instance was the first time they

44 achieved anything positive in front of the audience they were speaking to; prior times they were met with blank stares and acceptance. In Invisible Theater, reaction is the equivalent of a standing ovation.

Identity Correction: What is its purpose? What is its meaning?

Because the institution of the corporation, which accounts for individual companies themselves as well as organizations such as the WTO and the IMF that regulate in stride with corporate values, has often managed to have its way in constructing its own identity, the Yes Men have developed a resistance identity, through impersonation and satire, in order to counter act the image-machines that corporations and their supporters have at their disposal. The Yes Men, being most conspicuously composed of Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno, are more justly identified by what they do rather than who they are. One reason not extremely important, but important nonetheless, is that the Yes Men are not even Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno14, nor are they the only ones who participate in the projects. When acting as the Yes Men they have chosen to don their own particular nom de plumes, assumedly to distance their real identities from the ones acting as the Yes Men. More important however, is that beyond their names and who they are, they are their own brand of correctors of corporate and institutional identities, and mold much of what constitutes their identity out of what they believe the WTO stands for but fails to put forth as truth. The Yes Men act as a theatrical, mischievous sort of fact checker for any portion of the general public that is willing to hear them push market-logic to funhouse mirror versions of logical extremes, and fill in the blanks left out by their targets. They essentially interrupt and reinterpret the messages sent by the organizations they target in order to open a broader discourse.

Interrupting and reinterpreting messages place us back into the middle of a discussion about the function of culture jamming in dealing with power structures, and we can use the theory behind culture jamming to further understand their identity. Culture Jamming is theoretically geared toward disarming the Spectacle of modern life. The attack is against messages that involve us culturally, consciously and subconsciously, in a way that envelops us with trends and entertainment values that connect us intuitively to the messages of corporate values and corporate brands. Identity-correction, on the other hand, attacks the information and rhetoric we receive from corporate interests concerning global capitalist pursuits through moments of theatrical spectacle. Rather than jamming the enticing cultural messages that culture jamming proper attacks (i.e. advertising campaigns, the web of , disengaged citizens, etc.), identity-correctors provide an auditor‘s account of what is missing from the corporate report. The Yes Men are not asking us to believe that what we are being told is a method of control, they are telling us that we are not being told everything and we need to know more in order to be empowered. Knowledge is power, and the Yes Men are concerned that the knowledge of the citizenry is incomplete when dealing with many issues concerning social and global justice. The methods encourage empowerment by exposing information about global politics, and making visible issues out of backroom policies in our leading institutions. Culture jamming achieves success by opening messages to broader interpretations, and empowering the receiver to

14 Bichlbaum (Jacques Servin) is a writer and computer programmer currently living in France, and Bonanno (Igor Vamos) holds a teaching position in Media Arts at Renssalar Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. 45 critically engage media. The practice is a warning that we are being manipulated and told that being a good consumer equates to being a good citizen. The broad strategic concerns of culture jamming are over a society primarily built upon the accumulation of capital and efficient production, while the tactical attempts are made at critically engaging a media milieu of ―mesmerizing images and stupefying forms of entertainment‖ (Kellner & Best, pp.79-80).

Identity-correctors, namely the Yes Men, work in somewhat unorthodox theaters but the tactics link up to culture jamming by condemning the abuses of overly aggressive capitalism, and forcing a critical engagement of the corporate institutional identity that is pumped out through channels of media. Culture jamming is usually recognizable by its attacks on the corporate identities tied to brands, logos, and consumerism, but the Yes Men stretch into global politics and the illogical polices of globalization that easily find passage because the voices of concern and dissent have yet to reach adequate levels of participation within the system. As the masqueraders continuously poke their noses into rooms of the WTO and other high-powered organizations they get a sense not just of how degrading the policies are, but also how susceptible the invited participants are to excessively aggressive corporate and capitalist theories. The Yes Men have developed their identity-correction-identity through learning that by pushing free-market ideas to a logical extreme they can say something about the people and institutions that are making the important global decisions about environments, economics, governments, and global policy. As identity-correctors, they slowly piece together portraits of the institutionalized sources that add ancillary information to the commissioned ‗corporate portrait‘ hanging in the lobby of public information.

In struggles of communication and expression, the strategic goal is shared by large movements of social justice: drawing the world powers into a more democratic decision-making process that increases the weight given to voices of social justice and a lessens the power of capital expansion. However, the tactical matters that are employed in identity-correction are what make the Yes Men‘s individual identity their own unique portion of the larger strategic movement. They push the logic and faith in the market to extremes, and by doing so, act as tactical semioticians engaging the codes of communication concerning the trajectory of such logic.

By tactically engaging the power structures and media in the way that they do the Yes Men heed the call of Umberto Eco and, suit up as ―communication guerillas‖ (p. 144) battling for a responsible communication environment. Through their tactics, the Yes Men re-invent the source of the message (the WTO, Dow Chemical, etc.), and hijack the channel (the conferences or television appearances) in an attempt to ―show that the message can be interpreted in different ways‖ by ―restor[ing] a critical dimension to passive reception‖ (ibid., p. 143-144). The conferences that they attend and present at are minor news stories, but they offer a possible outlet to gain attention if the Yes Men can produce something preposterous enough to enhance its newsworthiness. As communication guerillas patrolling what Eco calls the ―universe of Technological Communication‖ (p. 144), the Yes Men are in a position to illustrate policy views to an extreme and re-contextualize the source of the communiqué. At the same time they achieve a level of authority by co-opting a channel that is known to be a powerful and hence a respectable conduit of information, the WTO for example. They are artists of truth but practitioners of impersonation and satire, and as such their main struggle is aimed at providing

46 more complete information regarding messages sent from, and identities maintained by their targets.

The Yes Men‘s vision of society is firmly rooted in not only disbanding the institutions of power but also affecting a paradigm shift that moves beyond the logics of modern capital to address the social needs of the world as a whole, first-world, third-world and everybody in between. This is what Nietzsche called a ―transvaluation of values‖ (Hardt & Negri, p. 274). The Yes Men value cooperation and communication with the larger global justice movement, and see themselves as part of it. They recognize the profound power of cultural movements to affect the economic powers of modern capitalism, and by engaging the cultural power of corporate brands and the hijacking nominal authority of the likes of the WTO, the Yes Men are able to distinguish themselves as acting participants in the ―accumulation of struggles‖ (ibid., p. 263) resisting the rhetoric surrounding what corporations and economic elites assert is being done for the global benefit of all.

The Yes Men act as identity-correctors, and use their correction tactics as immediate actions to surprise and stimulate reflection. Their strategy and comprehensive plan for a long-term campaign is to serve as ―communication guerrillas‖(Eco, p. 144) in the ―accumulation of struggles‖ (Hardt & Negri, p. 263) against capitalist strategies wherever the opportunity avails itself. The tactics and strategies are the final point of analysis that will be undertaking in this thesis. The next section will enter into the production point on the circuit of culture and critically engage what the Yes Men do as far as their strategies and tactics are concerned.

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CHAPTER 6

PRODUCTION

This chapter is about the production point on the circuit of culture that the Yes Men are being wrung through in this thesis. The following pages will work through Manuel Castells‘ third form of the origins of identity, project identity, as it analyzes the articulations of the dominant ideograph of globalization that the Yes Men produce as tactical challenges to the larger social structure, and I will show them to be working in the strategic role of cultural-intermediaries (or more appropriately counter-cultural-intermediaries) to effect a political, social, economic, and cultural reality. This brain-twisting lead-in simply means that I will be examining the ways in which the Yes Men are attempting to produce change, the nuances of which I attend to in detail below.

The outline that I will follow in this chapter is as such: the Yes Men take part in a project of creating identity (a project identity) ―that redefines their position in society, and by doing so seek the transformation of overall social structure‖ (Castells, p. 8), by offering their own articulation of the phenomenon of neoliberal globalization through ―image events‖ they produce while acting in the role of counter-cultural-intermediaries. Thus, I have five topics to walk through in order to complete this chapter‘s analysis. First, I will return to Manuel Castells‘ third and final concept in his origins of identity building: the project identity. Second, I will take a moment to examine the ideograph of neoliberal globalization in today‘s society. Third, I will turn to the concept of antagonisms and articulations that the Yes Men use to challenge such a dominant ideograph. Forth, I will read into the tactical methods (image events) that ultimately accrue into the organization of the strategic goals of the fifth and final point I will be examining, which is the strategic role of cultural-intermediaries, and the Yes Men's role as such cultural contributors.

The Project

Castells‘ concept of the project identity is defined by projects that develop around already entrenched groups or sites of resistance. This formation of identity involves undertaking a project calling for ―a different life, perhaps on the basis of an oppressed identity, but expanding toward the transformation of society as the prolongation of this project of identity‖ (2004, p. 10). Project identities form out of the development of resistance identities to go beyond the defensive stance of entrenched resistance, and begin to build on a project aimed at the ‗transformation of society.‘ He gives examples such as the post-patriarchal society, liberating women, men, and children through the realization of women‘s identity. This is the case ―when moves out of the trenches of resistance of women‘s identity and women‘s rights, to challenge patriarchalism, thus the patriarchal family, and thus the entire structure of production, reproduction, sexuality, and personality on which societies have been historically based‖ (p. 8). Castells also finds examples in the much different perspective of extreme religious movements that are attempting to cast all members of society as believers under God or Allah, in order to re- moralize and re-establish godly values to society through projects of divine design.

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For Castells, good or bad, these are the movements will have a role in constituting future society. In places where resistance takes root or develops a surrounding community, projects for structural overhaul have the opportunity to form around that foundation. In short, a shift occurs from negating what communities resist to affirming what it is that they are working toward. Castells argues that while power is still tightly held by the institutions of state, capital, and symbolic control (e.g. corporate media, churches, and so on), the resistance that forms, in response to those power structures, is capable of developing new projects around the existing sites of resistance. The projects are not about bargaining within the current system or becoming an interest group of some influence, but rather these new projects are movements that are geared toward redefining society on the basis of the chosen project contingent upon their ability to amass power in new landscapes of postmodern (or what Castells calls the network society) power struggles.

―The new power,‖ quoting Castells‘ key point, ―lies in the codes of information and in the images of representation around which societies organize their institutions, and people build their lives, and decide their behavior. The sites of this power are people‘s minds‖ (2004, p. 425). For example, as mentioned religious groups may form new societies based on eternal values that embrace groups from as nearby as the surrounding community to as expansive as the entire world, either way, on some scale, an attempt at forming a new society is made. Women‘s movements challenge patriarchal capitalism and the patriarchal state by undermining them and building the family on a new, egalitarian basis that involves the de-gendering of social institutions and re-characterizing women‘s role in society. As well, the environmental movement shifts from defending local environments and local health issues to the task of integrating humans and nature by rethinking anthropocentrism and redefining the socio-biological identity of humankind. The Yes Men, as part of the democratic globalization or global justice movement, push the logic of neoliberalism to extremes and recontextualize that logic, and the policies and theories behind it in a way that show it to be a design for a privileged few rather than the global whole.

Groups developing project identities aimed at changing cultural codes work with symbols or defining tropes and ideographs of society. The goal is to subvert frames of communication on behalf of alternative values. This is precisely what the Yes Men do toward their chosen end of redefining neoliberal globalization, and as such they are creators of a project of identity that supports the democratic movements surrounding social justice. Whereas I pointed out in the previous chapter that they rest a large portion of their identity (the resistance portion) on being opposed to corporate values, the grand project that they are working on is one that hopes to have a hand in the redefining of global power and capitalist globalization. Granted, the Yes Men cannot claim the breadth or strength of feminist, environmental, or religious movements, but they can be seen as role players in the democratic movement of global justice that can be viewed as a participatory force in evolving our society. I feel that when viewing the Yes Men, we can see them not only in a stance of resistance against corporate values, but also engaged in the project overhauling a system (globalization) that lacks democracy and justice in many vital ways. I will bring this more to light below.

Castells alerts us that the social movements that emerge from resistance and develop projects of identity are positioned to be the subjects of interest in what he calls the Information Age. This

49 means that in a world where the global increasingly affects the local, and the sites of power are diffused in global networks of wealth, information, and images, the effective contributors will be those that have built projects upon entrenched resistance movements, but articulate their position to a larger characterization of society. The effective contributors to change will be the ones who can articulate and re-articulate the common discourses, ideographs, and tropes of our society. His main argument, in The Power of Identity (2004, originally published in 1997), is that social movements in the Information Age are essentially mobilized around cultural values. In his book, The Internet Galaxy (2001), he follows up by noting ―the struggle to change the codes of meaning in the institutions and practice of society is the essential struggle in the process of social change‖ (p. 140). Following Castells' road map, as I proceed I will be turning my eye toward culture, codes, and institutions as they are struggled over as sites of resistance and worked on as projects of change. In sum, it is well stated by political scientist Barry Gills when he notes that, ―the politics of resistance is not merely reactive or defensive, or representing minority interest. Rather, it is a form of political action which should represent the general or societal interest and with the potential to transform the political situation and produce a real alternative‖ (p. 4).

Having attempted to explain the abstractions of the project the Yes Men are engaged in as a project that forms around entrenched resistance, and forms an aspect of their identity that seeks the potential to transform the images, myths, structures, and concepts that they contest, I will move on toward the production of the project itself. I will first take a moment to come to terms with the ideograph of globalization, then I will move onto the tactical measures that the Yes Men use to rethink this aspect of our emerging global, postmodern, networked society, and I will finish by compiling these measures into the strategic goal of the project of transforming a market based system supported by neoliberal theory into a more democratic and just playing field for the greater good.

Globalization

Globalization is one of the major forces shaping our world and our lives. It has been referred to as neoliberalism, sometimes free-market capitalism, some recognize it as a shrinking world connected in the name of the Network Society (Castells, 2000), but whatever the term one might choose, it is the defining political, economic, social, and cultural paradigm of our time. Sticking with Castells, he notes that globalization can be recognized by a ―technological revolution, centered around information technologies, [which] began to reshape, at an accelerated pace, the material basis of society‖ (2000, p. 1). Robert McCheseny sees it as being characterized by the term and driven by the concepts of neoliberalism, which is dedicated to ―free-market policies that encourage private enterprise and consumer choice, reward personal responsibility and entrepreneurial initiative, and undermine the dead hand of incompetent, bureaucratic and parasitic government, that can never do good even if well intended, which it rarely is‖ (Introduction to Chomsky, 1999, p. 7). While others from the land of ‘ bestseller lists see it broadly as the ―system that has replaced the old Cold War‖ (Friedman, 2000, ix), and the ―final form of human government, and as such…the end of history‖ (Fukuyama, 1992, xi). Nuances aside, the fact that the world is changing at the dawn of the new millennium is a detail most can agree upon. It is the theory behind the social, economic, and cultural changes that splits arguments into different camps.

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For those in the fields of critically analyzing society (e.g. cultural studies, media ecology, sociology, etc.), globalization refers to ―porous borders, the sheer scale of the collapse of space/time by new communication and information technologies, and the diffusion and merger of identities via these technologies‖ (Cox, p. 4). These characteristics open many possibilities for the cause of social change, but in the current information climate they are dominated and have been beaten to the punch by the supporters of what economists call ‗neoliberal globalization.‘ The battle over globalization is in many ways a war of words, or more precisely a battle over definition. Barry Gills points out ―the claims of social justice are submerged beneath claims for ‗natural justice‘ via the marketplace. Compete or die! Competition is life!‖ (p. 5). He indicates that this climate exists because ―globalization discourse invalidates its critics as ‗unrealistic‘ because they recognize neither the validity nor the inevitability of this single and ‗mythological‘ mode of thought‖ (p.6). The problem is, as Noam Chomsky reveals, that since the origins of the democratic system, built largely on the Federalist arguments of James Madison, ―the primary responsibility of government is to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority‖ (1999, p. 47), or to protect not the rights of persons and property, but rather to protect the rights of persons with property. The system that we live in was built by particular entities (the opulent, the powerful, corporate interests) in order to protect themselves, and shrewdly created it in a fashion that represented the leading forces to the public as beneficial for all. Again, from the keen eye of Chomsky, ―all of this is very natural in a society that is, to an unusual degree, business-run, with huge expenditures on marketing: $1 trillion a year, one sixth of the gross domestic product, much of it tax-deductible, so that people pay for the privilege of being subjected to manipulation of their attitudes and behavior‖ (1999, p. 58).

The supporters of corporate values, which were discussed in Chapter 5, stand to benefit continuously from neoliberal globalization if it follows the trajectory that it is currently on. The current course is one that sees to it that capital can flow freely in deregulated markets, expand in privatized industry and utilities, and flourish by making the private sector the primary engine of economic growth. Robert Cox, in his paper ―Golden Tropes and Democratic Betrayals,‖ has pointed to three conditions that the concept of economic globalization or neoliberalism is characterized by. (1) A set of liberalized market conditions for the global expansion of capital. Arguments buttressed by this characterization assume that liberalized, open, and free markets encourage investment and benefit economic growth. These stipulations require a lessening of state involvement, low corporate taxes, privatization of services, and the elimination of tariffs and other restrictions on trade, capital transfers, and direct foreign investment. (2) New multinational arrangements for the security of capital transfers, trade, and investment. This pushes for the integration of global economies into a framework of economic, legal, and political cooperation. Spearheaded by the agreements of the WTO, these arrangements are designed to ensure market access and to adjudicate (by the letter of ‗neoliberal economic law‘) disputes that may arise between participatory states and organizations. (3) A harmonization of the political norms and processes of nation states’ regulation of capital with the new transnational, institutional rules. This refers to the argument that beyond economic-based tariffs, there are social barriers to trade in particular countries. For example, regulations in areas such as health, food protection, workers‘ rights and safety, and environmental protection, are seen in the neoliberal globalizing system as hindrances to the flow of capital.

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Thomas Friedman, in his book The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization, writes, ―The historical debate is over. The answer is free-market capitalism‖ (p. 104). He offers close to five hundred pages of cheery accord and excitement about the direction that globalization moving. Friedman is not interested in the distribution of income but rather the generation of it. ―Other systems,‖ he writes, ―may be able to distribute or divide income more efficiently and equitably, but none can generate income to distribute as efficiently as free-market capitalism‖ (ibid.). This is the bottom line issue that many who see the harmful effects of neoliberal globalization or free-market capitalism take issue with. The goal should not be so narrow minded as to simply be focused on generating more and more, or as Marx called capitalism, ―a machine for demolishing limits‖ (quoted in Wright, p. 124). When, at the end of the twentieth century, the world‘s three richest individuals (Bill Gates of Microsoft, Helen Walton of Wal-Mart, and Warren Buffett) have a combined wealth greater than that of the poorest forty-eight counties (ibid., p. 128, 185), I would ask you to think back to the parable about the Paleolithic hunters that I recounted in the Introduction of this thesis about the possible dangers of excess. The paleo-hunters realized that by driving herds of wooly mammoth off of cliffs that they could kill three, four, or even ten at a time. What they did not account for was that there were a limited number of mammoth in their vicinity and eventually their greed led them to kill off the herd in a scale that left the hunters and their tribes without enough meat.

Just as I like this analogy about herds of wooly mammoth, so too does Mr. Friedman, but he uses the metaphor that he calls the ―Electronic Herd.‖ His Electronic Herd ―consists of the big multinational corporations who now spread their factories around the world, constantly shifting them to the most efficient, low-cost producers‖ (p. 109). While the preyed upon herds of mammoth dwindled, the new herd seeking cost efficient labor is growing into its own powerful beast. I am not going to prognosticate whether or not the Electronic Herd, in this sense being hunters themselves, will eventually fall prey to the same consequences that the hunters of the past did. I will only make this comment; the prey in today‘s scenario of the Electronic Herd is not sought for mere sustenance, it is sought because accumulation is the overall purpose of a system that seeks the fewest restrictions in order to create the greatest gain. This is precisely how Robert McCheseny defines what he calls neoliberalism (and what I am calling neoliberal globalization), referring to it as the ―policies and processes whereby a relative handful of private interests are permitted to control as much as possible of social life in order to maximize their personal profit‖ (Robert McCheseny‘s introduction for Chomsky, 1999, p. 7). The Electronic Herd are the moneymakers, and if you and your political leaders are not running with them, as Friedman will tell you, you are doomed to be marginalized by your choices.

In order to explain how an organization or a state becomes part of the Electronic Herd that Friedman advocates, he goes deeper into his never-ending bag of metaphors and pulls out what he calls the Golden Straightjacket. The Golden Straightjacket is the ―defining political-economic garment of this globalization era‖ (p. 104). A nation must put this garment on if it wants to be seen as moving forward, and also have the ability to move forward, because it has all of the rules of globalization that Cox laid out above stitched into its fabric. To me, it is a curious choice of metaphor, but one that I think tells us a great deal about the excesses of globalization. The Golden Straightjacket represents a forced institutionalization of the entire global population. The choice seems to insinuate that we are all crazy and need to be restrained, but by fitting ourselves with this restraint, we are free to chase our excesses over cliffs and into extinction, while

52 comforted by the fact that we are living by the authority of our global variation of Nurse Ratchet (WTO, IMF, global corporations, etc.). According to Friedman, when a nation puts on the Golden Straightjacket economies grow and politics shrink. Choices are shrunk to slim and none, or as he puts it ―political choices get reduced to Pepsi or Coke—to slight nuances of taste, slight nuances of policy, slight alterations in design to account for local traditions, some loosening here or there, but never any major deviation from the core golden rules‖ (p. 106). It is a global team of synchronized swimmers, all tasked with staying in step with one and other. From a different perspective, Robert McChesney sees this characterization as ―neoliberal democracy in a nutshell: trivial debate over minor issues by parties that basically pursue the same pro-business policies regardless of formal differences and campaign debate‖ (Robert McChesney‘s Introduction for Chomsky, 1999, p. 9). One size fits all.

The likes of Robert McCheseny and Noam Chomsky have a different take on the character of globalization. They do not see it as the ―end of history,‖ or the answer to a great historical debate. These scholars, among many others, come to the table not with a sense of awe about its possibilities for the few whom can take advantage of the system, but rather with a sense of caution and even dread about what it means for the majority of the world‘s citizens. The problem is that the negative and damaging concepts and theories of neoliberalism are largely unused and rarely discussed among the public-at-large, especially in the United States. We are a society that votes in alarmingly low numbers, and are more likely to be able to name five fast- food chains than five of our political leaders. I am not going to get into who has stronger influence in global economic affairs, a MacDonald‘s C.E.O. or a U.S. Senator, but as I have stated throughout this work, I believe far too often that we are manipulated into being good consumers rather than public citizens.

The rules, policies, and opinions that I have alluded to above are defining ideographs of the concept of globalization, and the battle over the minds of the public, is at this time being won by those who stand to benefit from and champion the doctrine of neoliberalism. ―Mo‘ money, mo‘ money‖ makes sense to many people and it is a difficult task to get them to recognize that, when policies and rules are designed to aid the accumulation of excessive capital, it comes with a price. A price in terms of labor polices, environmental policies, and quality of life issues. This adjustment of perception and policy is the starting point for the project that global justice activists such as the Yes Men are engaged in. Their first task is to re-articulate the common recognition of globalization and the power it enjoys in, as Castells terms it, ―the codes of information and images of representation around which societies organize their institutions, and people build their lives, and decide their behavior‖ (2004, p. 425). Because, ―the sites of this power‖ again coming from Castells, ―are in peoples‘ minds‖ (ibid.). I will now move onto the task of examining the antagonisms and articulations that the Yes Men provide for their part in this project of transforming a free-market, neoliberal economic society into a democratic, socially just society.

The Yes Men as Articulating Antagonists

In order to understand the Yes Men in the way I would like to in this section we need to understand them as being recognized in the category of ―new social movements.‖ New social

53 movements (NSMs) are recognized as networked groupings ―that do not focus on the distribution of material goods, the expansion of institutional political rights, and security, but rather thematize personal and collective identity, contest social norms, challenge the logic of the governing system, and, in sum, deconstruct the established naming of the world‖ (DeLuca, p. 25). The field of struggle for NSMs takes place on ―cultural grounds‖ in the ―domain of civil society‖ as they challenge information and the ―images of culture itself‖ (ibid., p. 25-26). Thus, in the sense of the ‗project‘ that the Yes Men are involved in (what I am calling democratic globalization as part of the global justice movement), is seeking a re-articulation of the cultural codes and information that dominate the public perception of neoliberal ideologies. Quoting poststructural political theorists Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, DeLuca offers this definition of articulation (p.37-38):

Any practice establishing a relation among elements such that their identity is modified…The practice of articulation, therefore, consists in the construction of nodal points which partially fix meaning and the partial character of this fixation proceeds from openness of the social, a result, in its turn, of the constant overflowing of every discourse by the infinitude of the field of discursivity.

This definition is coming from two French Post-Marxist theorists, and thus a bit dense, but if you take the time it can make sense. First, using the Yes Men as an example, the articulations that they create for organizations such as the WTO relate the policies of the WTO to the particular injustices throughout the world (mainly a faithful belief in the power of neoliberal theory), thereby modifying the WTO‘s identity. What the two theorists mean by their ―nodal‖ reference, going with our case subject, is a linking of the WTO and its policies to global problems that are not mentioned often enough when the WTO is the topic. They are opening up the discourse, or ―overflowing it‖ with possibilities.

A clear definition of articulation can be gained by understanding that it has two aspects: ―speaking forth elements and linking elements‖ (ibid., p.38). The linking of elements to already existing articulations allows for such elements to be understood and spoken of in new and broader ways. This is all part of the ongoing struggle over meaning, which in this case is the linking of the neoliberal paradigm that adds a veil optimistic promise to globalization with the organizations that support and enrich its proponents, namely the WTO. The Yes Men, however, step into the meetings of world leaders and the minds of the public and force us to rethink the prospect of a world driven by market logic and unwavering accumulation of capital.

When they force us to rethink the neoliberal paradigm, they interject antagonisms into the public arena that point to the limits of the particular discourse, and ―make possible the questioning, disarticulating, and recalculating of hegemonic discourse‖ (DeLuca, p. 40). For example, throughout the history of political thought the term ―democracy‖ has referred to a social condition of equality and respect for the individual, and a promise that his and eventually her vote will have some determining effect on the elected officials. However, through particular instances this truth has been challenged in the United States, and throughout the world (e.g. the

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2000 presidential elections, Chomsky‘s notion that democracy was designed to protect the opulent minority from a wanting majority, and the role that money and corporate contributions have in driving U.S. campaigns among others). The Yes Men, in their work, attempted to antagonize this articulation even further when they presented an updated theory of democracy designed to be more in alignment with the theoretical concepts of neoliberalism. They were invited to speak (as representatives of the WTO) at a conference at the Center for International Legal Studies (CILS) in Salzburg, Austria. At this conference they proposed that corporations be allowed to buy citizens‘ votes through auction. This comment on the way that money undermines democracy allows a citizen voter to sell his or her vote to corporate and wealthy bidders. By rethinking the process of democracy in market driven world, the Yes Men disarticulate and rearticulate the concept of democracy. This rearticulation of democracy introduces the antagonism that democracy is not always protective of the individual and it brings up questions about the role that corporate money plays in an electoral system that is supposed to protect the individual voter and citizen.

Antagonisms such as this, carried out by the Yes Men, are disruptive to discursive elements that compel beliefs and actions, and as I will explain below, this makes them tactics in the project that they are involved. It is also necessary to note that the matter of the audience, or who is introduced to these antagonisms, is vastly important, but it is a matter that I will attend to later as well. At this point, I am simply introducing the analytical theory behind the actions of the Yes Men so that this discussion can now move onto a close reading of the image events they conduct, and how those events take advantage of particular antagonisms located within the discourse of neoliberalism and globalization.

Image Events

Image events, in the case of the Yes Men, are tactical methods that are employed to contest the hegemonic discourse of neoliberal globalization. They are tactics in the sense that Michel de Certeau defines tactics: The place of a tactic belongs to the other. A tactic insinuates itself into the other‘s place, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its entirety, without being able to keep a distance. It has at its disposal no base where it can capitalize on its advantages, prepare its expansions, and secure independence with respect to circumstances…Whatever it wins, it does not keep. It must constantly manipulate events in order to turn them into opportunities (p. xix).

In this tradition, the Yes Men enter into the meetings, conferences, and public appearances of organizations as the WTO and take advantage of the conceivable and at times inconceivable extremes that the logic of neoliberal globalization can be pushed to. They do not go to take over the meetings, or bring them to a halt; rather they go in order to expose the participants (and through their own documentation and media outreach, an audience that is not privileged enough to be in the meeting) to the extreme realities that they support. The tactics of the Yes Men are designed in recognition that the strategy of condemning the neoliberal crusade on its factual merits has its limits. For one thing, as Chomsky has pointed out, it is ―natural‖ for many

55 believers of neoliberal globalization to believe in the system that tells us that the ―problem has been solved, and that the ‗end of history‘ has been reached in a kind of utopia of the masters‖ (1999, p. 58). Even though the system is one that suits the needs of the few, not the many, it remains accepted because ―neoliberalism‘s loudest message is that there is no alternative to the status quo, and that humanity has reached its highest level‖ (McCheseny‘s introduction to Chomsky 1999, p. 15).

The Yes Men open up the ―end of history‖ debate by furthering its logic to describe a future that would hopefully cause any somewhat compassionate person to cringe. The disturbing thing is that most of the time the audiences do not cringe. At the Salzburg CILS conference, when they described the need to do away with cultural barriers such as the Italian siesta, because as they noted in their presentation ―sleep is done during the day as much as at night‖ (The Yes Men, p.36), they were met mainly with indifference, other than one attendee that simply worried that while the policy was understandable it was sure to ―make many people quite angry‖ (ibid., p. 46).

It is the logical extreme in the face of the neoliberal power centers that defines the tactical measures of the Yes Men. They sing the praises of the exploitation of cheap labor around the globe, and condemn education systems that offer too many points of view and highlight the problems of interfering with capitalism. However, they do it in a way that illustrates the harsh realities that lie beneath the good-natured façade of personal freedoms, personal empowerment, and accessible free-markets by attempting to demonstrate to their audience the inhumanity that the neoliberal positions lead to.

The Yes Men contest the linking of neoliberal economic theory with the idea that it is the only successful paradigm left for the world to follow. They also contest the benevolence of the corporate agenda, and thus the promise that this trajectory is the path to salvation and a better world. In this sense they draw their own map charting the direction that these philosophies will take the world, and they do it in arrogant fashion while representing the WTO.

For example, when Granwyth Hulatberi, spokesman for the WTO (actually Andy Bichlbaum of the Yes Men) appeared on CNBC‘s ―European Marketwrap‖ the day before the Genoa G-8 summit in July 2000 he was quick to point out that ―There is an increase in poverty in the world, there is an increase in inequality, there are various things that the protestors are talking about that are undeniable‖ (The Yes Men, p. 56). By saying these things, he shows the WTO to recognize the problems, and thus the danger of WTO policies, but just as the WTO and proponents of their philosophies do not let such trivialities stop them, neither does Mr. Hulatberi as he expands upon the reason that the WTO is correct:

What the protestors lack in this analysis of theirs is an understanding. I mean you have a mass of protestors, an essentially ragtag group, who are trying to compete with a mass of knowledge that we at the WTO, and experts all over the world, have—knowledge that is based in books that have been written since the 1770s, in England, you know, in the 18th and 19th centuries about this. These books allow us to be absolutely certain

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that free trade, although it has led to problems that the protestors correctly point out, is certain to lead to a bettering of conditions for all consumers (The Yes Men, p.56).

By representing the WTO as an organization that has it all figured out, so to speak, regardless of the ills that it recognizes, the Yes Men are able, with the use of satirical mockery, to show the WTO as being callous to the hardships of the world and tailors of philosophies that are to be followed regardless to whether they are an ill fit for those on the margins (the impoverished and the exploited), but rather because they are the ones with the power, and they are the ones to set the course. This discourse flies in the face of the humanitarian rhetoric of neoliberal globalization that claims to offer possibilities and benefits for all, and opens up the debate because it represents the WTO as acknowledging its ills but being indifferent to them nonetheless. Mr. Hultaberi goes on to further expand on the idea that the WTO represents the powerful and the protestors do not when he states that:

The protestors, are simply too focused on reality, and on facts and figures. There‘s an enormous number of experts at all the greatest universities in the world, who have read all these books, who have read Adam Smith and everything since it to Milton Friedman, and these people who have solid theoretical basis for knowing things that will lead to betterment (ibid., p. 59).

The Yes Men bring up the question as to what makes the powers that be correct. Is it reality, or is it the books that they have read and the theories that they follow? They do not give any answers but they offer eye-opening questions by representing the WTO in the manner that regardless of reality, they WTO is right.

In other instances they have gone beyond theories and philosophies, and walked into the realm of prognosticators offering an audience a glimpse into the future that market philosophies promise. In their lecture to leaders of the textile industry in Tampere, Finland at the international conference called ―Textiles for the Future,‖ they pointed out the possibilities of management control over labor in a system that finds management in one region while labor is sought in far- off locales. In their presentation they took on the issue of the global labor force, not as an issue of exploitation as many of the ‗protestors‘ see it, but rather as a problem of management controlling these far-away workers, and they do it with gross exaggeration. By touching on the contradictions or the lack of humanitarian concern of those present in a room full of industry leaders the Yes Men felt that any arguments based upon facts and figures were doomed to go unheeded. Thus, they took what they believed to be widely held beliefs, and pushed them to a point of absurdity. The audience was looking for ways to not only maintain the progression of globalization, but also to solve particular problems inherent in the developing system. The solution the Yes Men provided was the Management Leisure Suit (MLS). The MLS, as I have mentioned before, is a golden leotard fitted with a three-foot phallus-like appendage equipped with a video monitor that allows a manager who wears the suit to maintain close visual contact with a remote labor force. This tactic was aimed at drawing the ire of those in the room because of its extremeness, but sadly it turned out that it came across as acceptable and even feasible.

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Some in the audience may have even been as ‗excited‘ about the innovation as the presenter himself.

The lack of provocation and debate within the walls of the conference, however, does not remove the moment form being worthy of a closer look. The physical suit of the Yes Men bears an interesting resemblance to the metaphorical Golden Straightjacket of Thomas Friedman. Friedman‘s straightjacket is a garment intended to integrate the world into the logic of neoliberal globalization. The Yes Men‘s MLS is a garment intended to integrate a remote workforce into the same logic, but on a more specific scale (the individual company, manager, and worker). By exposing the arrogance, visually with a three foot erection, and conceptually by allowing a manager in one location to control workers in another location that that manager has likely never been, the Yes Men underline a condescension in the belief that those who are privileged in one sector of society have rights to dominate another sector of society. The tactic is not intended to negate the philosophies directly, but rather to put them into such a ridiculous light that would force them to be questioned. In Tampere however, the questions did not come. This points to the willingness of our business leaders to ‗naturally‘ (as Chomsky puts it) accept the neoliberal doctrine as one that will have its quirks in the method, but if that method is aimed at more efficient production, then the subsequent course is being followed faithfully. It also shows that as we move along this path, without question or ‗alternative‘ (as Friedman propounds) things can get ridiculously out of hand. This tactic of the Yes Men is to conduct a simple joke, but it highlights that if we as a society accept the doctrine of the WTO without question, then these absurdities can turn into real-life dangers. For instance, what other methods are we willing to accept as means to control workers? What other arguments, regarding the infallibility of the powers-that-be are we going to let go by, and what further atrocities of poverty, hunger, and exploitation are we willing to accept because they fit with in the doctrine of organizations such as the WTO and their neoliberal philosophies?

As these tactics of groups such as the Yes Men and others highlighting exploitation and exposing hidden beliefs and information amass into a larger strategic formation, we can come to see them not as a movement themselves, but rather as disparate practitioners that are part of a larger whole striving to redefine particular aspects of our socioeconomic culture.

Counter-Cultural Intermediaries

The Yes Men push these particular logics and policies of organizations such as the WTO to extremes in order to clarify the positions of these organizations and make them legible for people that might not be as informed as they could be given the opportunity to know more. Mike Bonanno illustrates this as he sifts through a number of magazines (transcribed from the film, The Yes Men),

This is why we are doing these things, this is why we go and do these conferences. It‘s not for the two hundred people or the hundred people that might see us give the lecture, umm, although we‘d like them to come away with an interesting experience from the lecture, the reason we do it is so that people who read Bizarre magazine, or the New York Times, or Fortune, or Harper‘s can

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read about it in the mainstream press. I mean this is how millions of people could read about it and potentially get turned on to some of the ideas of anti-globalization (transcribed from The Yes Men movie 046:30-047:08).

This getting ―turned onto some of the ideas of anti-globalization‖ is the point at which the tactical measures of image events link up with a larger strategic framework of anti-globalization. This occurs when the tactics of the Yes Men bring about recognition of ideas that challenge the theory that globalization must be linked to the concepts of neoliberalism.

This tactical linking with strategy is discussed by Michel de Creteau as only he can, when he writes, ―the tactical trajectories which, according to their own criteria, select fragments taken from the vast ensembles of production in order to compose new stories within them‖ (de Certeau, p. 35). As the Yes Men compose ‗new stories,‘ in the mainstream press, about what they believe represents the real WTO they tactically seize opportunities and manipulate events that create moments of victory for the ―weak‖ over the ―strong‖ using clever tricks and know-how to get away with things and aid the strategic challenge to the ‗vast ensembles of production‘ imposed on everyone by the production of neoliberal hegemonic discourse. These moments of victory, while not capitalized upon in an accrual nature by the Yes Men themselves (they come and go fleetingly in these particular places), are aimed at linking up with the larger ideas of anti- globalization, democratic globalization, or social justice.

In this sense, the Yes Men act as a sort of ―cultural intermediary‖ as originally described by Pierre Bourdieu, as ―groups of workers involved in the provision of symbolic goods‖ (Nixon & du Gay, p. 496). However, being that cultural intermediaries are most commonly considered as ―workers,‖ as Bourdieu describes them, in the sense of ―advertising practitioners, management consultants, PR people, and so on‖ (ibid.), I think it is best to further define the Yes Men‘s role as ‗counter-cultural intermediaries.‘ Cultural intermediaries are ―able to exert, from their position within the cultural institutions, a certain amount of cultural authority as shapers of taste and the inculcators of new consumerist dispositions‖ (ibid., p. 497). Cultural intermediaries also ―play an active role in promoting consumption through attaching to products and services particular meanings and ‗lifestyles‘ with which consumers will identify. Put simply, they can be defined as people in the provision of symbolic goods and services‖ (du Gay, et al., p. 62). For the Yes Men on the other hand, they do not promote consumption of goods and services, but they do promote a symbolic retooling of the progression of globalization and the particular meanings identified with it. They act as intermediaries promoting education and awareness of the processes going on behind the closed doors of the like of the WTO.

The strategies of mainstream anti-globalization movements around the world have been to document the record of the WTO and its allies, in an attempt to have strategic base off of which to work and transform the global system and society (Wallach & Sforza). They compile statistics, document ill-fated policies, and act as voice to counter those of neoliberal globalization. The Yes Men, however, serve in the role of tacticians or counter-cultural intermediaries working within the project of transforming the relationship between countries and people of power and those who are marginalized by that power, not as a base or place of resistance, but rather as an opportunistic beacon drawing the public into the debate of about the

59 justice of globalization. They are a promotional force highlighting the vast movement of democratic globalization, in ways that they hope will attract people that otherwise might not be attracted to the complex issues of globalization or the taxing requirements of traveling the world in order to come face-to-face with lines of armored police forces in order to confront the elites at their meeting sites.

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CHAPTER 7

CONCLUSION

This thesis began by mentioning the historical fall of the Berlin wall on November 9, 1989. The event was used to illustrate the great ideological struggle of the age, what Francis Fukuyama called ―the end of history.‖ His argument was that ―liberal democracy may constitute the end point of mankind‘s ideological evolution,‖ and the ―final form of human government, and as such constituted the end of history.‖ As I mentioned at the beginning, Fukuyama was not arguing that democracies are perfect, rather they have flaws and social injustices, but the flaws existed because the twin principles of liberty and equality, which are sought in the United States‘ Declaration of Independence, had yet to be successfully implemented. During the past two decades these arguments have been the cornerstone of logic for organizations, corporations, and groups that hold enormous power and resources, and are satisfied with a worldview dominated by neoliberal and corporate profit principles. This view, held by so many in powerful positions, that there was only one way of progress, assumed that democracy and capitalism were not only a destination but also a calculated goal.

Many however, including culture jammers like the Yes Men have argued that these principles have ignored the dangers and harmful effects in which such ideological movements result. This thesis has focused on, not only those who oppose such ideological goals, but also the strategies and tactics used by the oppositional forces of culture jammers. As the movement of culture jamming has grown and evolved in its opposition to the particular ―myths‖ espoused by multinational corporations and supportive governments concerning the tropes of globalization, I have laid out the progression through the particular representations, identities, and production techniques of the group the Yes Men.

The Yes Men have entered into a battle over cultural signification using momentary acts of harassment aimed at the identity of corporate influence. Throughout this thesis I have developed a contemporary snapshot of the Yes Men and the ever-evolving movement of culture jamming. The Yes Men have come to exist as a natural result of Umberto Eco‘s call for an army engaged in ‗semiologcal guerrilla warfare in the theater of Guy DeBord‘s ‗Society of the Spectacle‘. Eco and Debord, along with Marshall McLuhan have warned that a lack of critical media consumption in today‘s advanced media age can be dangerous, and the Yes Men have made it their work to illustrate such dangers in their own theatrical way. They do not necessarily give us a direct critical reading of the promise of globalization and neoliberal policies, but rather they extend to extremes the hopes that progress in a system is not the gold sought at the end of the rainbow. The Yes Men are able to show in an informative yet entertaining manner that we are experiencing a globalized system, driven by market logic that philosophically guides us to ignore excess and reward greed.

In the course of their actions, the Yes Men are walking a fine line of effectiveness. The modern movement‘s ancestors, DeBord and the Situationists were opposed to the acts of parody as an effective rhetorical strategy because it maintained, rather than unsettled the audience‘s idea of

61 the truth. Yet, marginal movements are often rendered invisible by corporate mass media until they explode in the form of media events that call for public attention. It often takes over the top performances of the likes of the Yes Men to reveal the profound problems existing in the current system. Theatrical tactics combat the invisibility problem by dramatizing issues to such an extreme that they become irresistible to media. In the use of their theatrics, the media are lured in via the high-level entertainment value. In the process, the media are critiqued for their willingness to cover such stories as news, while at the same time the hoax itself may be aimed at another entity of the Yes Men‘s choosing. Tactics of this sort are effective because, a hoax in this manner offers a critique on multiple levels: a critique of an infotainment based society, and a critique of the entities that profit and promote such a society. It is the purpose of the Yes Men to reveal a ‗struggle over meaning‘ that does not deny inequality, but rather highlights it as contested terrain. I believe that because the Yes Men take advantage of the voracious appetite of the media for news that is above all else, entertainment, the opportunities that present themselves to the Yes Men are constructive in the instances that they are asked to speak post facto about their escapades. This allows them a brief opportunity to steer the conversation to the heart of the issue that they are attempting to expose.

The success of the Yes Men is in reducing a set of complex issues down to more easily digestible ‗image events‘ that shake up the comfort level of understanding broad geopolitical issues. The Yes Men‘s success is a result of reconstituting the identity of the dominant culture by challenging and transforming mainstream society‘s key discourses and ideographs. It is important that the Yes Men not only dissect the ills of dominant culture and politics, but also that they do it in a way that shows up on the radar of the mainstream. Many of us live a comfortable, convenient life, but how many understand the price paid for such lifestyles. How are the products we buy made? How safe is the food we eat? What are the true discrepancies between the rich and the poor? The battle that these activist groups fight by addressing these questions is a difficult one. These groups are not only fighting for a piece of the pie, but also simply to get a seat at the table.

The Yes Men have fought for this attention in a number of ways. Initially they used a familiar form of political protest, but over time their work evolved into a more media friendly and savvy set of practices that have been captured in two documentary and an accompanying book. The initial impact at the moment the event was carried out had one effect, but different impacts emerged when press coverage followed, and then again when the movie was released into theaters and DVDs. The initial impact received blips of news coverage and hits in the blogosphere. The media they create themselves have a longer lasting possibility of impact. The film is in Netflix, the book is on Amazon, and their name and reputation is more and more visible and recognized through their website, blogs, news coverage, and continued actions.

One of the biggest challenges the Yes Men face is the struggle to attain in depth media coverage. The media tends to limit coverage by focusing on the tactics more as acts of mischief rather than a force of resistance. This legitimizes The Yes Men to a broad audience not as activists but rather as entertainers. To an audience that is unconcerned with critical media intake, their goal of highlighting global injustices is limited by their success as producers of entertaining hijinks. They then become more like Jackass than Jack Straw.

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Of course, any press is good press, but because the Yes Men are seeking more than just attention, at times these achievements are limited. Yet in the realm of their own identity politics, they can find better levels of achievement. Their politics are not designed in a fashion to speak for a particular identity group, but rather against the groups of power that they oppose. In their actions, they take on those who they feel portray a false identity, and they move to correct it through their projects of ―identity-correction.‖

Culture jamming as movement is theoretically geared toward the disarming of the Spectacle of modern life. So, for the Yes Men the acts of ―identity-correction‖ are aimed at the information and rhetoric we receive from corporate interests concerning global capitalist pursuits through events of theatrical spectacle. The actions of the Yes Men are created to illustrate the shortcomings in global free-market tropes. They work in unorthodox theaters with tactics that condemn aggressive capitalism, and force the engagement of the corporate identity through channels of traditional media. The Yes Men‘s acts of ―identity-correction‖ go beyond traditional attacks of culture jamming aimed at brands, logos, and consumerism to challenge the illogical polices of globalization. These tactics make the Yes Men unique in the larger strategic movement. They push logic and faith in the market to extremes, and by doing so act as tactical semioticians engaging the codes of communication. This places them squarely in the role of Eco‘s ―communication guerillas‖ battling for a responsible communication environment. They reinvent the source message, and hijack the channel in an attempt to show that messages can be interpreted in different ways by adding critical dimensions to passive media intake. Their actions as ―identity-correctors‖ use unique tactics to surprise and stimulate reflection in the battle that Hardt & Negri have called the ―accumulation of struggles‖ against capitalist strategies.

In this struggle I have labeled the Yes Men as ‗counter-cultural-intermediaries‘. In this role, the Yes Men are not looking to become an interest group engaged in bargaining with the institutions of state, capital, and symbolic power. Rather, the actions they take are geared toward redefining society. They push the logic of neoliberalism to extremes and recontextualize that logic in a way that shows it to be designed for a privileged few rather than the global whole. It is important for the Yes Men to be conscious of not only positioning themselves as being opposed to corporate values, but also to have a hand in redefining global power and capitalist globalization. In success, the Yes Men will heed to what Castells has called (2001), ―the struggle to change the codes of meaning in the institutions and practice of society is the essential struggle in the process of social change‖ (p. 140). It has been proven that free market capitalism can generate income and wealth, but the glaring problem is that the distribution is exceedingly inequitable. This is the bottom line for many who see the growing ills of the globalizing market. The effort is to point out the inequities in regards to the vastly productive success. When at the end of the twentieth century, the world‘s three riches individuals (Bill Gates, Helen Walton, and Warren Buffett) have a combined income greater than that of the poorest 48 countries combined!, I think it‘s time to start giving some thought to the ills of a system that intrinsically results in avarice and inequality. We are trained to be wealth builders and good consumers while millions are poor, hungry, unhealthy, and dying for the wrong reasons, so the Yes Men and others like them appropriately ask, ‗Why?‘ Why does the benefit wealth only serve a relative few? Why is it necessary to produce at the detriment of others? Why is the leading agenda the corporate agenda? And, why is justice built on the foundation of freeing oneself to amass riches regardless of the detriment to so many others.

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If we are to understand the Yes Men as they move along in their quest to ‗fix the world‘ we need to continue to stay abreast of their adventures. Since this thesis began, they have distributed one million copies of a bogus , with ‗real news‘. They have challenged world leaders on by storming the United Nations from the East River (an instance in which Andy was arrested for being dangerous while dressed in a big puffy marshmallow suit). They have impersonated the Camber of Commerce and momentarily reversed their position on climate change. And they have released a new film chronicling their newest ‗corrections‘. Further work will be beneficial to extend the readings that have been done in this thesis to the most recent, and also extend the lessons to future actions that the Yes Men and others may choose to undertake. Research is also necessary to begin to develop ways to measure the levels of success in the audience consumption of the Yes Men‘s projects. It might be possible to measure effects of these projects on individuals by devising experiments that delve into reactions to the movie, the book, or their web presence. Also, as mentioned they recently produced an entire true to life version of the New York Post complete with full-page spreads and articles illustrating their viewpoint on the world. By exposing subjects to these artifacts in controlled scenarios it may offer some insight into the way the actions of the Yes Men are consumed.

While the actions and the reactions to the Yes Men are of a theoretical nature and difficult to measure in quantitative results, it is the existence of the media that they so dutifully create that can be exposed to more cause and effect investigations. As well, the Yes Men are a constantly evolving group in terms of membership, strategies and tactics. These evolutions should be continually examined in the fashion I have shown here for future research projects and activist planning.

For myself, the largest issue at stake when examining the Yes Men and others similar to them is the quote I offered earlier from Marshall McLuhan, ―World War III will be a guerrilla information war…fought not in the sky or on the streets, but in newspapers and magazines, on the radio, on TV and in cyberspace.‖ Of course the large problems of global injustices, war, poverty, and environmental dangers are the big problem these activists face. Yet, if they are to have any measure of success it will come in the form of learning to manipulate an ever eroding conscience on the part of the media to report on real news rather than big entertainment. The Yes Men do take advantage of this problematic de-evolution of responsible media, but there best gift may be exposing it for what it is…a tendency of large and influential media outlets to ignore complicated news stories in favor of easy attention grabbing infotainment. I have taken an interest in this form of culture jamming because it asks us, as citizens to remain critical, remain vigilant, and to remain creative, always with an eye toward achieving a balance. McLuhan famously wrote that as the mass media becomes more and more of an influence in individual lives, the individual dies, and a new man is born on a new scale. It would be nice if that ‗new man‘ could become more of a critical reader of the influence media in our lives, to that I would say, Yes Man!

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BOIGRAPHICAL SKETCH

I am originally from Stuart, Fl. I graduated with a bachelor‘s degree in History from Florida Atlantic University. In my younger days I was known as He-Art the irreverent folk/punk rocker. I traveled the land sharing my music and my album ―Swinging Naked From The Vine‖ with Zeitgeist Rekords. When I finally took a proper job it was in the art publishing industry. I can regularly be found attending Florida Marlins games in the hot south Florida summers. I have a dog named Henry, but sometimes I call him Hank.

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