Abstract
What do Russian samizdat, The Simpsons and the carnivals of the Middle Ages have in common? As readers of Culture Jamming, we learn that both ‘underground publishing in defiance of official censorship’ (p. 47) in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the American television show ‘parodying the corporate world’ (p. 254) and medieval pranksters baptizing pigs during carnivals are all ‘part of a historical continuum’ (p. 47) that involves courageous individuals actively challenging ‘existing structures of power’ (p. 19). Since the 1990s, various such tactics used to ‘ “jam” the workings of consumer culture’ (p. 6) have become known as ‘culture jamming’, and DeLaure and Fink’s book presents a significant number of ‘key texts’ (p. xvii), which unpack the specificity of the ‘semiotic defamiliarization’ (p. 6) involved in activists’ ‘interrupt[ing] the flow of mainstream, market-driven communications’ (p. 6).
The conversation presented in the book transcends a scholarly discourse, as the contributors to the volume include, for example, experienced culture jammers, Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonnano, ‘known as Yes Men’ (p. 441), Paolo Cirio, an artist who ‘is regularly threatened with prosecution for his subversive actions’ (p. 442), and the anonymous The Guerilla Girls ‘who use … outrageous visuals to expose discrimination and corruption’ (p. 443). Scholars of communication and media studies (e.g. Anna Baranchuk, Jack Bratich and Marco Deseriis) ensure the academic thoroughness of the discussion whilst the reader, presented with factual material and an array of arguments and opinions, is left to decide for himself or herself whether culture jamming is an effective way of challenging traditions or is ‘too cute to say something revolutionary’ (p. 251).
The book’s 24 chapters, which follow DeLaure and Fink’s useful introduction, are divided into three uneven parts: part I ‘Definitions and debates’ (chapters 1–5); Part II ‘Critical case studies’ (chapters 6–16) and Part III ‘Culture jammers’ studio’ (chapters 17–24). Definitions of culture jamming emerge in the course of the analyses of this multifaceted phenomenon, as the authors identify key features that characterise varied forms of what it involves. In particular, DeLaure and Fink note that culture jamming uses an existing culture’s features and turns them against it. They further claim that culture jamming operates serially, is artistic, often humorous and anonymous, yet participatory and political. It transgresses ‘spatial and normative’ (p. 22) boundaries, ‘disregards copyright law and private property ownership’ (p. 24) and in the twenty-first century, traverses national boundaries and has become a global phenomenon as ‘[t]he studio for the cultural jammer is the world at large’ (p. 47).
Dery associates culture jamming ‘in its purest form’ (p. 50) with media hoaxing and demonstrates its methods using for example con artist Joey Skaggs, whose chosen objective to reveal how ‘the media has been turned into a government propaganda machine’ (p. 51), is achieved by creating a believable fake news story and exposing the process of its creation. He begins by ‘get[ting] someone from an out-of-state newspaper to run a story on something sight unseen’ (p. 50) – in one case, he created a fake story about a non-existent brothel for dogs. Then Skaggs reproduces that story ‘in a second mailing’ (p. 50), and journalists believe it because it is something that has appeared in print. Subsequently, ‘a snowflake becomes a snowball and finally an [uncontrollable] avalanche’ (p. 50). (Skaggs’ fake story about the Cathouse for Dogs evoked American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals’s [ASPCA] angry response and received an award ‘for best news broadcast of the year’ (p. 50)). After Skaggs’ fake news story appears in the media, he holds a conference where he reveals his deception. By revealing his own hoax, he demonstrates the mechanism of media hoax creation in principle and then he can talk about media as a propaganda machine.
Accounts of case studies in Part II expose controversies associated with culture jamming, such as for example, filmmaker Emile de Antonio illegally obtaining archival footage for his documentary Millhouse: A White Comedy when ‘he drew on material that had been stolen from an NBC [National Broadcasting Company] archive’ (p. 165). The reader also learns that graphic artist Shepard Fairey’s use of a news photo taken by Mannie Garcia for the production of his Obama ‘Progress’ (later ‘Hope’) poster, resulted in Fairey and the Associated Press ‘su[ing] each other over the artist’s use of Garcia’s photo’ (p. 179). In his essay ‘Facing: Image and Politics in JR’s Global Street Art (2004–2013)’, Michael Le Van explains how French street artist JR ‘defac[es], refac[es] and effac[es] the city’ (p. 201) as the images of giant faces that he ‘pastes … onto buildings, roofs, trains, bridges, busses’ (p. 203) ‘disrupt and disarm the visuality of global power’ (p. 216). Baranchuk’s essay examines Pussy Riot’s feminist antiauthoritarian punk performance in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, which ‘was perceived by many Russians as blasphemous’ (p. 365) and Bratich shows how the Catholic practice of canonizing saints and ‘merging them with locally existing figures and practices’ (p. 328) was mocked in the creation of San Precario – ‘a saint for precariously employed workers’ (p. 328).
The essays that comprise the first two parts of the book focus very much on the rift between, on the one hand, culture jammers, ‘anticorporate globalization activists’ (p. 113), daring rare individuals who seriously engage in ‘cultural critique’ (p. 301) and ‘performative resistance’ (p. 301), and on the other, the general public, who jammers despise and consider as members of a ‘passive audience’ (p. 182) and ‘a bunch of ad-fed cattle’ (p. 143). The essays comprising Part III, however, offer a possibility of a genuine dialogue between these two uneven groups. In the final chapters, culture jammers address the reader (who can be a member of the general public), in their own words providing the theoretical explanation of their actions that ‘disrupt the experience of daily life’ (p. 282) and draw people’s attention to important social issues. In particular, Kembrew McLeod gives an account of his successfully obtaining ‘ownership of the phrase “freedom of expression”’ (p. 393) as his intellectual property from the US Patent and Trademark Office. McLeod intended this to be a prank, exemplifying the absurdity of ‘copyright clearance culture [that] creates unnecessary obstacles for teachers’ (p. 393): ‘[n]o one at the USPTO seemed to be morally, socially, or politically unsettled’ (p. 394) by the idea of one individual having a monopoly over this phrase in a number of contexts. The officially recognised ownership of ‘freedom of expression’ gave McLeod the legal right to contest the use of the phrase without his consent in an advertisement, and thus McLeod made his point as the story spread on the Internet.
It could be said that Culture Jamming will be most useful to those who are driven by the idea of change, as the volume endorses endeavours ‘to shift how we experience and interpret the world’ (p. 14). However, in my view, those who are reluctant to accept change will probably benefit from it even more as they are invited to discuss culture jamming as a particular form of civic engagement, or ‘cultural acupuncture’ (p. 143), in Slack’s words. The authors of various accounts presented in the book demonstrate the justification and sometimes the moral necessity of jammers’ actions, which may appear legally and ethically dubious on the surface. In Bonanno’s words, ‘the most powerful result of the activism often is just getting other people involved’ (p. 421), and this book certainly does that: by presenting accounts of unconventional activities in the conventional format of a well-organized and well-written book, the contributors have made a massive step towards encouraging a debate between culture jammers and traditionalists.