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Copyright Mark Dery; All Rights Reserved Copyright Mark Dery; all rights reserved. Brief quotation, for scholarly or critical purposes, is permitted under the Fair Use clause of U.S. copyright law; all other uses of this text, including reprints of it in its entirety, must be approved by the author in writing. Contact: markdery AT verizon DOT com. Mark Dery Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of Signs1 A brief introduction to the 2011 reprint The term “cultural jamming” and the concept behind it first appeared on JamCon ’84, a 1984 cassette-only release by the audio-collage band Negativland. The group, whose socio-political satire and media criticism often have a sharp, Situationist edge, applied the idea of “jamming” to billboard banditry (jamming was the jokey, trollish practice, then prevalent in the CB radio community, of disrupting other users’ conversations with obscene or nonsensical interjections; billboard banditry is the neo-Situationist practice of illegally altering billboards to perversely funny, usually political effect in order to critique consumerism, capitalism, representations of race and gender in advertising, or American foreign policy). Inspired by Negativland’s work in general, and JamCon ’84 in specific, I used my readings in postmodern theory, Baudrillard, McLuhan, and Stuart Ewen’s politicized histories of consumer culture to historicize and theorize Negativland’s notion of “cultural jamming”, which my Inner Grammarian insisted on retooling as culture jamming. In my December 1990 New York Times article on the subject, I used Negativland, the media hoaxer Joey Skaggs, the graffiti artist Robbie Conal, the parody billboard painter Jerry Johnson and Reverend Ivan Stang of the tongue-in-cheek Church of the Subgenius cult as poster children for culture jamming—media age provocateurs who expose “the ways in which corporate and political interests use the media as a tool of behavior modification.”.” It was the first appearance of the phrase and the concept in the mainstream media. In my 1993 Open Magazine pamphlet, Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of the Signs, a revised version of which appears below, I theorized the concept in greater depth, teasing out its historical precedents and excavating its philosophical foundations, among them Bakhtin’s reading of medieval carnival as symbolic subversion; the Situationist theory of the Spectacle and concomitant practice of détournement; and the Baudrillardian theory of postmodern society as a hyperreality. The conceptual thread running through the secret history and philosophical operating code of culture jamming was the idea of guerrilla semiotics, a term I coined—with a debt to Umberto Eco’s concept of “semiological guerrilla warfare” duly noted—and that I unpack at length in my essay, below. After I published my New York Times article, I wrote a series of articles for the Canadian anti-consumerism magazine Adbusters, beginning with “Subvertising: The Billboard Bandit as Cultural Jammer” (Adbusters, vol. 2, no. 1, Fall/Winter 1991), in which I introduced editor/publisher Kalle Lasn to the term “culture jamming” and to the theories it embodied. Lasn took the concept and ran with it, branding his magazine as the house organ of the Culture Jamming Movement®, peddling anti-consumerist swag through the magazine’s website and publishing a jammer’s manifesto of sorts, Culture Jam: The Uncooling of America, a strategy that has earned him the ire of jammers like Carrie McLaren. In her essay “CULTURE JAMMING™ brought to you by Adbusters” McLaren charges Lasn with reducing the phenomenon to a few pointless vagaries (“challenge your economics professors to justify their scientific credentials in class”) and things to buy—air-time on local TV to air Adbusters’ anti-commercials, Buy Nothing Day promo goods (irony, anyone?), and the Culture Jammer’s toolbox, where, for $35, you get a poster, stickers, The Culture Jammer’s Video, a Buy Nothing Day t-shirt and extra copies of Adbusters. Then inside the back page, in case you missed those two pages, there’s a full page of Culture Jamming materials. A set of six posters and postcards ($15), the Culture Jammer’s Calendar ($13), The Culture Jammer’s Video and Back Issues. Order before September 15 and get a second calendar free!... Beat ’em at their own game, I guess is the thinking. But what comes out is no real alternative to our culture of consumption. Just a different brand. What she said. I share McClaren’s pique at Adbusters’ complicity in the commodification of anti-consumerism (not to mention Lasn’s benign neglect, in too many interviews, of the role my work played in bringing the concept to his attention). To be sure, Adbusters’ exhortations to critical thinking and media literacy are crucial, especially when they fall on teenage ears. My ambivalence about the magazine springs from its shrink-wrapping of anti-consumerism: culture jamming calendars replete with subscription cards and merchandise order forms, and so forth. Also, my nose wrinkles at the Dworkinesque censoriousness that wafts from the magazine’s neo-puritan insinuation that alcohol use leads inevitably to alcohol abuse, that coffee consumption is a profound social evil. In such moments, it exudes the deep-rooted distrust of the masses’ ability to police their own desires that makes strange bedfellows of moral crusaders on the left and the right. ● Eighteen years after my manifesto hit indie bookstores, the look and feel of culture jamming, at least, have been appropriated by the mainstream, tirelessly promoted by Adbusters (oh, the irony!) and hijacked by guerrilla advertisers to ambush unsuspecting consumers. Perhaps it’s high time we asked whether culture jamming, like the medieval Feast of Fools to which it is distantly related, was always just a species of repressive desublimation (does anyone quote Marcuse anymore?); a socially sanctioned release valve for class resentment and pent-up fury at social injustices and economic inequities that might have found more profound political expression if they hadn’t been harmlessly exorcized via carnival rituals or, in culture jamming’s case, acts of symbolic resistance such as billboard banditry and media hoaxes. (The same thing happened with the American version of Christmas, a thinly disguised Saturnalia, in which besotted working-class roughnecks invaded the homes of the wealthy, demanding drink and a handout. In the nineteenth century, Washington Irving, Clement Moore and other members of New York’s anxious elite manufactured the “traditional” American Christmas, re-imagining the holiday of booze-sodden misrule as a genteel observance of domestic harmony and a frenzy of conspicuous consumption.) The cultural theorist Brian Holmes has questioned the utility of “semiotic activism”, under which heading he files culture jamming. Appropriating the signs and symbols of dominant culture is “promising”, he grants, but it only matters when it happens within the much larger framework of social movements, with experiential, organizational, political and legal dimensions. Pure semiotic activism is not particularly irritating for capitalism… But it does have meaning and importance to the extent [that] it participates in larger movements. To be sure, culture jamming and other forms of semiotic guerrilla warfare aren’t going to bring capitalism to its quaking knees. If you really want to Strike at the Heart of the State, slip a dinner jacket over your explosive vest, infiltrate the next Bohemian Grove retreat, then hit the detonator and turn America’s ruling class into bloody chum. (Not that I’m advising such extreme—and extremely futile—measures. As Eco argues in “Striking at the Heart of the State”, postmodern power is decentralized and phantasmic—“headless and heartless”, everywhere and nowhere, globalized and stateless, able to route around the legal and political restrictions of nation states with fiendish ease. “The [multinational] system displays an incredible capacity for healing and stabilizing”, writes Eco. “Wherever it is struck, that place will always be peripheral.”2) Let’s face it: culture jamming is armchair activism for Derrideans—a grad student’s Intifada. They don’t call it symbolic resistance for nothing. It’s not going to lower the cost of prescription drugs, reduce the level of chlorofluorocarbons in the upper atmosphere or give Poppy Bush a myocardial infarction. It’s a compliment to, not a substitute for, the inglorious grunt work of real political change—community organizing, grassroots activism, lobbying politicians, drafting legislation, throwing your body upon the gears of power. But in a Society of the Spectacle, where power is exercised increasingly through pre-spun media narratives and staged events—think of Bush’s infamous “Mission Accomplished” photo op, in Top Gun drag—fighting symbolism with counter- symbolism is an essential part of any activist strategy. If a tree falls in the forest of signs and a network news camera isn’t there to record it or a blogger isn’t there to blog it or a bystander isn’t there to capture it with her cameraphone, does it still make a sound? You don’t have to be Baudrillard to know that the answer, in our hopelessly mediated moment, is a resounding “No.”.” In 1943, Winston Churchill told the scions of America’s ruling class in a Harvard lecture that “the empires of the future are the empires of the mind.” Now, the parallel world of news narratives, advertising symbolism, Hollywood fables and videogame imagery is a theatre of war where the contest of narratives—the struggle for control of the meaning of things and thus for control of the public mind—is being fought. Obviously, this doesn’t mean that reality is roadkill. Media reform activists such as Robert McChesney, who founded the organization Free Press to lobby for radical changes in FCC regulations and telecommunications policy, are vitally important. But so, too, are billboard bandits who hijack the public address system of advertising, deconstructing its visual rhetoric to expose the grasping materialism, Stone Age sexism, class anxiety, body loathing, bogus hipness and faux rebellion that grease the gears of most ad campaigns.
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