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Contentious Politics, Culture Jamming, and Radical Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Master's Theses Graduate School 2009 Boxing with shadows: contentious politics, culture jamming, and radical creativity in tactical innovation David Matthew Iles, III Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_theses Part of the Political Science Commons Recommended Citation Iles, III, David Matthew, "Boxing with shadows: contentious politics, culture jamming, and radical creativity in tactical innovation" (2009). LSU Master's Theses. 878. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_theses/878 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Master's Theses by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. BOXING WITH SHADOWS: CONTENTIOUS POLITICS, CULTURE JAMMING, AND RADICAL CREATIVITY IN TACTICAL INNOVATION A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in The Department of Political Science by David Matthew Iles, III B.A., Southeastern Louisiana University, 2006 May, 2009 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis was completed with the approval and encouragement of my committee members: Dr. Xi Chen, Dr. William Clark, and Dr. Cecil Eubanks. Along with Dr. Wonik Kim, they provided me with valuable critical reflection whenever the benign clouds of exhaustion and confidence threatened. I would also like to thank my friends Nathan Price, Caroline Payne, Omar Khalid, Tao Dumas, Jeremiah Russell, Natasha Bingham, Shaun King, and Ellen Burke for both their professional and personal support, criticism, and impatience throughout this process. Finally, I would like to thank my family for providing me with all of the support imaginable. They are an incalculable and indispensable element in my life and work. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................................ ii ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................................... v CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................... 1 1.1 THE QUESTION .................................................................................................................. 1 1.2 ORGANIZATION AND INTENTION ................................................................................ 5 1.3 CULTURE JAMMING ........................................................................................................ 7 1.3.1 History and Conceptualization ....................................................................................... 7 1.3.2 Claims, Organization, and Strategy ............................................................................. 11 CHAPTER 2. LITERATURE REVIEW ...................................................................................... 16 2.1 CONTENTIOUS POLITICS .............................................................................................. 16 2.2 REPERTOIRES OF CONTENTION ................................................................................. 23 2.3 TACTICAL INNOVATION .............................................................................................. 25 2.3.1 Innovation and Diffusion ............................................................................................. 25 2.3.2 Theories of Tactical Innovation ................................................................................... 28 2.3.3 Strategic Theory of Innovation .................................................................................... 30 CHAPTER 3. THEORETICAL DEVELOPMENT ..................................................................... 34 3.1 BIOGRAPHICAL THEORY OF TACTICAL INNOVATION ........................................ 34 3.2 THE HABITUS AND REFLEXIVITY .............................................................................. 37 3.2.1 Bourdieu‘s Theory of Practice ..................................................................................... 37 3.2.2 Reflexivity, Crisis, and Choice .................................................................................... 41 3.2.3 Bourdieu and Tactical Innovation ................................................................................ 46 CHAPTER 4. STRUCTURAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL DETERMINANTS ........................ 50 4.1 CONSTRAINT AND CONSTITUTION ........................................................................... 50 4.2 THE FIELD OF ART ......................................................................................................... 55 4.2.1 Genesis and Structure .................................................................................................. 55 4.2.2 General Aestheticization and the Aesthetic Disposition .............................................. 58 4.2.3 The Situationists and a Political Art ............................................................................ 61 CHAPTER 5. EMPIRICAL ILLUSTRATION ............................................................................ 64 5.1 METHOD AND DATA ...................................................................................................... 64 5.2 THE CRITICAL ART ENSEMBLE .................................................................................. 68 5.2.1 Introduction .................................................................................................................. 68 5.2.2 Tactical Repertoires ..................................................................................................... 73 5.2.4 Dispositions, Strategies, and Tactics ........................................................................... 76 5.3 UBERMORGEN................................................................................................................. 81 5.3.1 Introduction .................................................................................................................. 81 5.3.2 Tactical Repertoires ..................................................................................................... 84 5.3.3 Dispositions, Strategies, and Tactics ........................................................................... 88 iii CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................. 91 WORKS CITED ........................................................................................................................... 97 APPENDIX: CULTURE JAMMING INDIVIDUALS, GROUPS, AND EVENTS ................. 111 VITA ........................................................................................................................................... 114 iv ABSTRACT Dominant theories of tactical innovation in contentious politics suggest that actors innovate in times of crisis or at the margins of familiar forms of action in order to achieve strategic advantage. I argue that these theories do not satisfactorily account for the tactical creativity of a form of contention called culture jamming. Instead, I employ a biographical theory of tactical innovation to explain their distinct repertoire of contention. This theory claims that tactics are partially explained as emanations of or congruent with the life experiences, identities, dispositions, and values of actors. Bourdieu‘s field theory allows me to identify a social context generative of an aesthetic disposition, the field of art. It is my contention that a politicized aesthetic disposition is responsible for the observed tactical creativity and innovation of culture jamming. Such a disposition allows for the perception of everyday life objects, discourses, and practices as aesthetic. These common, mundane, even ugly materials are then susceptible to tactical and strategic appropriation. Through an analysis of two culture jamming groups, Critical Art Ensemble and Ubermorgen, I empirically illustrate my application of the biographical theory of innovation. v CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 1.1 THE QUESTION A small group of young men and women sit in supermarket aisles and pray to the products before them. A crowd gathers around a man playing with a train in a public site before security threatens to arrest him. Two men copyright phone number tones. A man auctions his vote online, and Google advertising is harnessed to purchase Google stocks in a vicious cycle of auto-cannibalism. A cursory glance at this list of eccentric performances illustrates a glaring ignorance: what are they doing? These largely epiphenomenal or mundane and symbolic acts are protests, performances of resistance, acts that traverse a rich terrain of politics, art, economics, culture, and everyday life. They originate from a rich genealogy that stretches across the twentieth century; the Situationist International represents a point of pronounced and concentrated development in this history.1 This group of politico-cultural activists, informed by the radicalism of Dadaism, Surrealism and other avant-garde movements, formalized a conception of resistance against consumer capitalism and its accoutrements. Situated primarily in the discursive and semiological,
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