Culture Jamming

Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to thank Vincent de Jong for introducing me to the intricacy of the easyCity action, and for taking the time to answer my questions along my exploration of the case. I also want to thank Robin van t’ Haar for his surprising, and unique, contribution to my investigations of the easyCity action. Rozalinda Borcila, the insights you have shared with me have been a crucial reminder of my own privilieged position – your reflections, I hope, also became a marker in what I have written. Also, I would like to thank others that somehow made my fieldwork possible, and influenced my ‘learning’ of activism and culture jamming. Of these I would especially like to thank Nina Haukeland for introducing me to the politics of activism, Kirsti Hyldmo for reminding me of the realities of exploitation, Åse Brandvold for a skilled introduction to the thoughts and tools of culture jamming, and Maria Astrup for showing me the pleasures and powers of aesthetics. Also, I would like to thank the Norwegian Adbusters Network, and the editorial groups of Vreng. To my main advisor Professor Kristian Stokke, I would like to thank you for the excellent support you have given me throughout my master studies. Your insights have been of grate value, and I cannot thank you enough for continually challenging me. Also, the feedback from Olve Krange, my second advisor, was crucial at the early stage of developing the thesis, to defining its object of inquiry, and finally when writing my conclusion. I would also like to express my appreciation to Professor Oddrun Sæther for an excellent introduction to the field of cultural studies, to Professor Matt Sparke at the University of Washington for demonstrating the intriguing complexities of political geography, and to PhD candidate Stephen Young, for proof reading and fruitful inputs at the final stage of writing. Finally I would like to give a special thanks to Berit Kristoffersen and Martin Aaserud. Berit, for teaching me the importance of telling a story, for your continual interest in, and patience with, the ideas I have pursued, and not the least, your invaluable knowledge and understanding of political processes and constellations of power. Martin, besides from your help, I would like to express my appreciation of our many explorations of ideas on creative resistance, for stressing the presence of possibility, and above all, for insisting that there is sound in silence and that I should understand the richness in listening. 1 Table of Contents Chapter 1 – Thesis Introduction ___________________________________ 4 Plan of Thesis ____________________________________________________ 10 Part I Chapter 2 – A History of Research ________________________________ 14 Project Design ____________________________________________________ 15 A Multi-sited Fieldwork of Ethnographic Character __________________ 18 Barcelona ________________________________________________________ 20 Milan and Bologna ________________________________________________ 22 Amsterdam and EasyCity__________________________________________ 25 Concluding Remarks ______________________________________________ 29 Chapter 3 – Culture Jamming_____________________________________ 30 An Assorted Genealogy ____________________________________________ 31 Communicative Play ______________________________________________ 38 Conclusion _______________________________________________________ 46 Chapter 4 – Writing Worlds _______________________________________ 48 Dominance and Contestation_______________________________________ 48 Cultural resistance________________________________________________ 52 Democratic Contestation __________________________________________ 55 Space ____________________________________________________________ 57 Concluding Remarks ______________________________________________ 60 Conclusion Part I - A Framework _________________________________ 63 Part II Introduction Part II – easyCity ___________________________________ 66 Chapter 5 – Jamming the Evidence of Materiality ________________ 69 Narrations of the Neoliberal Production of Space ____________________ 70 The Political Economy of Neoliberal Urbanism ______________________ 72 The Present of the Future easyCity _________________________________ 74 The Unsettling Materiality of the easyCity Action Space______________ 78 Chapter 6 – Jamming the Urban Economy of Experience _________ 82 The Symbolic Economy ____________________________________________ 83 Jamming Objects of the Urban Order _______________________________ 84 2 ‘Branded New World’______________________________________________ 86 Art and Spatial Politics____________________________________________ 89 Conclusion Part II – Jamming the Urban Landscape______________ 93 Part III Introduction Part III – The Promise of Democracy _______________ 98 Chapter 7 – The Neoliberal Political and Spectacle ______________ 100 ‘The Neoliberal Political’__________________________________________ 101 The ‘Politics’ of Spectacle _________________________________________ 105 Conclusion Part III – The Neoliberalisation of Democracy_______ 116 Chapter 8 – Thesis Conclusion ___________________________________ 120 List Of Illustrations Figure 1: A Trojan horse on the Amstel .......................................................... 4 Figure 2: easyCity opening-preparations ........................................................ 7 Figure 3: A Diesel ‘spoof’ ad ........................................................................... 14 Figure 4: San Precario,................................................................................... 23 Figure 5: One of the shop’s visitors................................................................ 26 Figure 6: The easyCity logo............................................................................ 27 Figure 7: Billboard alteration ........................................................................ 32 Figure 8 Mobilisation for anti-war demonstrations...................................... 35 Figure 9: Lady in Pink.................................................................................... 37 Figure 10: Billboard alterations).................................................................... 39 Figure 11: Anti-gentrification struggles........................................................ 41 Figure 12: A fictitious movie poster............................................................... 43 Figure 13: easyCity shop opening.................................................................. 79 Figure 14: The easyCity postcard .................................................................. 87 Figure 15: In the easyCity shop, at the counter (......................................... 99 Figure 16: From Hackney London (photo courtesy Martin Aaserud) ........ 106 Figure 17: Also from Hackney in London.................................................... 106 Figure 18: From inside the easyCity shop................................................... 112 Cover Design Maria Astrup 3 Chapter 1 – Thesis Introduction Figure 1: A Trojan horse on the Amstel (photo courtesy Vrije Ruimte) On the 26th of September, year 2001, a rather unusual vessel made its way up the canal Amstel of Amsterdam (de Jong Interview 27.01.06). On a floating platform stood a beautifully crafted, six meters tall wooden horse. Its height demanded the raising of bridges, its escort of six boats carried rather jolly crews who hopped ashore by the bridges to let passers-by in on the intension of this rather odd transport. Landing at the square in front of City Hall, the council in meeting this day, the crew staged a minor spectacle of speeches, dance, and play and vanished. Left on the square was the horse, hollow as the famous gift offered the Trojans, though not carrying soldiers, but ideas. The bringing of this creature marked the launch of the book Laat 1000 vrijplaatsen bloeien. Onderzoek naar vrijplaatsen. The book documented struggles over occupied spaces in Amsterdam and was delivered with personal messages from representatives of the city’s many squats. Pretty as it was, many stopped to admire the horse. However, it became a puzzle to City Hall and, the symbolism being rather odd, the council decided to burn it. The gift offered came from a group within the squatter movement of Amsterdam, Vrije Ruimte (translated Free Space). Manifesting their resistance to the council’s privatisation politics, the group stated that free public spaces are still in demand and will be claimed. 4 The Amsterdam activists’ challenge to City Hall resonates with a geographically and politically extensive field of activisti groups. Contesting the commodification of urban environments, these groups have made public space both the site and the objective of their resistance. Though far from a coordinated, coherent movement, they share an agenda: Claiming urban space through a direct action appropriation that temporarily transforms the cultural functions of the city. Since the early 1990s, groups like the carnivalistic Reclaim the Streets in London1, the bicycle-oriented Critical Mass of San Francisco2, and the theatrical Surveillance Camera Players in New York3 have developed concepts that have been adopted and transformed by groups in cities across Western Europe and North America. Also, outside these ‘activist nodes’, alternative, smaller scale forms of urban activism have emerged4, like guerrilla gardeners’ temporal transformation of asphalt spaces into green spaces. Seeing urban spaces as

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