Cultural Activism T HAMYRIS This volume addresses contemporary activist practices that aim to interrupt and reorient Cultural Activism politics as well as culture. The specific tactics analyzed here are diverse, ranging from culture jamming, sousveillance, media hoaxing, adbusting, subvertising, street art, to I hacktivism, billboard liberation, and urban guerilla, to name but a few. Though indebted NTERSECTING to the artistic and political movements of the past, this form of activism brings a novel dimension to public protest with its insistence on humor, playfulness, and confusion. This book attempts to grasp both the old and new aspects of contemporary activist practices, as well as their common characteristics and internal varieties. It attempts to open up space for the acknowledgement of the ways in which contemporary capitalism affects all Practices, Dilemmas, and Possibilities Editors Begüm Özden Firat our lives, and for the reflection on possible modes of struggling with it. It focuses on the Aylin Kuryel possibilities that different activist tactics enable, the ways in which those may be innovative or destructive, as well as on their complications and dilemmas. N o The encounter between the insights of political, social and critical theory on the one 21 hand and activist visions and struggles on the other is urgent and appealing. The essays collected here all explore such a confrontational collaboration, testing its limits and productiveness, in theory as well as in practice. In a mutually beneficial relationship, theoretical concepts are rethought through activist practices, while those activist practices are developed with the help of the insights of critical theory. This volume brings scholars and activists together in the hope of establishing a productive dialogue between the Activism Cultural theorizations of the intricacies of our times and the subversive practices that deal with them. Aylin Kuryel is a doctoral candidate in Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA). Her dissertation focuses on the image politics of nationalism. She is also involved in artist/ activist collectives and film-making. Begüm Özden Fırat is an Istanbul based activist. Besides, she is Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology at the Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in Istanbul, Turkey. Frontispiece: collage by İlhami Nisvan. ISBN 978-90-420-2981-1 Rodopi 9 789042 029811 THAMYRIS INTERSECTING PLACE, SEX AND RACE No 21 [2010] Thamyris 21 Cover.indd 1 24-08-10 07:54 Thamyris/Intersecting No. 21 (2010) 9–20 Introduction Cultural Activism: Practices, Dilemmas, and Possibilities Begüm Özden Fırat and Aylin Kuryel On November 12, 2008, commuters in New York City, Los Angeles, and a few other US cities were informed of the end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on the front page of The New York Times, which was handed out in the streets for free. The paper also reported that a national health care system was to be established, corporate lobbying was soon to be abolished, the maximum wage law had succeeded, and all public universities were to become tuition-free. The advertisements were somewhat unusual. The ExxonMobil one read: “Times have changed. Oil fields have reverted to a newly independent Iraq and Congress has mandated ‘Fair Trade,’ a system in which most profits go not to brokers, stockholders, and a small management circle, but flow directly to those who produce. Exxon is excited about helping to do things better—not just because it’s the law, but because Exxon has always been about innovation” (http://www.nytimes-se.com). The Corrections: For the Record section included a self-reflective gesture when The Times apologized “for underreporting the effects and dangers of media consolidation, perhaps due to our own efforts at media consolidation: The Times owns almost two dozen regional newspapers, a number of television and radio stations, and partial shares in the Red Sox and the Discovery Channel” and declared that it “will voluntarily trust-bust itself, thus contributing to the independence of American journalism” (http://www.nytimes-se.com). To their dismay, careful readers would realize that these items were news from the future, as the edition was post-dated July 4, 2009. The subsequent press release declared that the paper was a hoax, “an elaborate operation six months in the plan- ning” by a diverse range of groups, including The Yes Men, the Anti-Advertising Agency, CODEPINK, United for Peace and Justice, Not An Alternative, May First/People Link, Introduction | 9 Improv Everywhere, Evil Twin, and Cultures of Resistance.1 In the supplementary spoof website of the New York Times, the prankster editorial of the newspaper explained—with an unstated reference to the recent election of Barack Obama as US president—their intention as follows: But things are different this time. This time, we can hold accountable the politicians we put into office. And because everyone can now see that the “free market” has noth- ing to do with freedom, there is a huge opening to pass policies that can benefit all Americans, and that can make us truly free—free to pursue an education without debt, go on vacation every once in a while, keep healthy, and live without the crushing guilt of knowing what our tax dollars are doing abroad. (http://www.nytimes-se.com/2009/ 07/04/the-fine-print) While the New York Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis wisely declared, “It is fake and we are looking into it” (www.reuters.com), the spoof edition, fiercely subverting The Times’ motto “All the news that’s fit to print” as “All the news we hope to print,” reached over a million commuters and possibly many more internet users. The Yes Men, which appears to be partially responsible for the spoof, is a group of anti-corporate activists performing what they call “identity correction” through which they impersonate corporate and government spokespeople so as to expose their “true” character and thereby spread anti-capitalist messages. So far, they have fooled numer- ous conference organizers, government officials, and network television producers into helping them correct the identity of George W. Bush, the World Trade Organization, McDonald’s, Exxon Mobile, Halliburton, and Dow Chemical among others.2 The Yes Men is one of the many contemporary activist groups—such as Critical Art Ensemble, Reverend Billy, the Space Hijackers, Etcétera, Las Agencias, Billboard Liberation Front, Grupo de Arte Callejero (GAC), Institute for Applied Autonomy, The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, and Mujeres Creando, to name a few— that work for societal transformation within the broader framework of contemporary anti-capitalist, anti-consumerist, and alternative-globalization struggles. The actions and campaigns of such collectives have brought about alternative modes in which political activism can be innovative and destructive. This volume of Thamyris/Intersecting: Place, Sex, Race focuses on such contempo- rary activist practices directed toward disturbing and reorienting the cultural and polit- ical sphere by attacking the narratives of truth in society by way of diverse tactics, such as culture jamming, sousveillance, media hoaxing, adbusting, subvertising, flash mobs, street art, hacktivism, billboard liberation, and urban guerilla, to name but a few. This form of activism, with its insistence on creative interventions based on the notions of humor, playfulness, and confusion appears to bring a novel dimen- sion to conventional strategies of protest. The difference between the so-called old and new forms of action is made clear in a text by autonome a.f.r.i.k.a.-gruppe, Luther 10 | Begüm Özden Fırat and Aylin Kuryel Thamyris/Intersecting No. 21 (2010) 9–20 Blissettt and Sonja Brünzels, who co-authored the Handbuch der Komunikationsguerilla (Handbook of Communication Guerilla): Guerrilla communication doesn’t focus on arguments and facts like most leaflets, brochures, slogans or banners. In its own way, it inhabits a militant political position; it is direct action in the space of social communication. But different from other militant positions (stone meets shop window); it doesn’t aim to destroy the codes and signs of power and control, but to distort and disfigure their meanings as a means of counter- acting the omnipotent prattling of power. Communication guerrillas do not intend to occupy, interrupt or destroy the dominant channels of communication, but to detourn and subvert the messages transported. (http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/ nettime-l-9809/msg00044.html) The practice of subverting dominant messages transmitted by hegemonic powers is, no doubt, hardly new. It is inspired from and indebted to previous avant-garde artistic and political movements of the past—from Dada and Situationist International to the Yippies and the Diggers.3 The Situationist “connoisseur” Ken Knabb, for instance, points out that The Times spoof “is an example of the situationist tactic of ‘detourne- ment,’ ” that is, the reuse of preexisting aesthetic elements, media forms and corpo- rate images to convey opposing—and often witty—messages (www.bopsecrets.org). According to Guy Debord, the strength of the “detourned” object stems from creating a “double meaning, from the enrichment of most of the terms by the coexistence within them of their old senses and their new, immediate senses” (55). While the spoof appears not to have taken seriously Debord’s advice that “détournement is less effective the more it approaches a rational reply,” it nevertheless wittily fools