Carducci,Vince. 2006. Culture Jamming-- A Sociological Perspective; Journal of Consumer Culture 6.pdf

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Journal of Consumer Culture
http://joc.sagepub.com
Culture Jamming: A Sociological Perspective
Vince Carducci
Journal of Consumer Culture
2006; 6; 116
DOI: 10.1177/1469540506062722
The online version of this article can be found at:
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Journal of Consumer Culture
ARTICLE
Culture Jamming
A Sociological Perspective
VINCE CARDUCCI
New School for Social Research
Abstract.
‘Culture jamming’ is defined as ‘an organized, social activist effort that aims to
counter the bombardment of consumption-oriented messages in the mass media’
(Handelman and Kozinets, 2004: n.p.). This article seeks to understand culture jamming
from a sociological perspective, situating it in the ‘expressivist’ tradition, which
originates with the mid-18th century thinker Rousseau and whose legacy extends to
postwar Western counterculture. Culture jamming is seen as an investigation into the
apparatus of representation in late modernity, as it relates to both images and discourses
of the media and commodity system, and the expression of political will. By providing
an incentive for producers to respond to consumer demands for environmental
sustainability and an end to labor exploitation, culture jamming may ironically help
rehabilitate the market system it often portends to transcend. This may indeed serve to
ameliorate certain ‘market failures’ of the global system.
Key words
consumer resistance
●
culture jamming
●
‘hacktivism’
●
social marketing
●
social
movements
●
the expressivist turn
INTRODUCTION
Fieldnote, Monday, 10 May 2004, 11:54 a.m.
I’m walking down Fifth Avenue from the New York Public
Library on my way back to the New School. Ahead, I see a guy
standing in front of the Duane Reade drugstore on the
Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications
(London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Vol 6(1): 116–138 1469-5405 [DOI: 10.1177/1469540506062722]
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Culture jamming
northeast corner of 34th Street, across from the Empire State
Building. He’s handing out plastic bags to passersby who
mechanically grab them as they hurry to make the light before it
changes. From a distance, I notice the familiar red and blue
interlocking ‘DR’ of the pharmacy chain’s logo, and presume the
store has a street promotion going on. I come up to the corner,
take my bag, and keep walking across the street, not making eye
contact with the person handing it to me. I look down at my
hand and notice that the ‘DR’ isn’t a ‘DR’ at all, but a ‘DG’.
Underneath the letters, it reads not ‘Duane Reade’ but ‘Dwayne
Greed’. And underneath that it reads ‘New York’s Greediest
Employer’.
It turns out the action on the street is a ‘culture jam’, the
appropriation of a brand identity or advertising for subversive,
often political, intent. In this case, the ‘jamming’ is being done by
the Retail, Wholesale, & Chain Store/Food Employees Union
(R
WCSFEU) Local 338. Inside the bag is information about
how Duane Reade exploits its employees, overcharges its
customers, and otherwise acts disreputably.
Inspired by the technique of electronically interfering with broadcast
signals for military or political purposes, the term ‘culture jamming’ is
believed to have been coined in 1984 by the West Coast-based perform-
ance/activist group Negativland to describe a variety of activities (Dery,
1993; Klein, 2000; Morris, 2001). These include such tactics as the alter-
ation of corporate advertisements by the Billboard Liberation Front, the
parody of corporate and nongovernmental organization (NGO) websites
by the Yes Men, and the appropriation of consumer goods through
shoplifting and rebranding by Yomango. Much of this activity is chroni-
cled in the magazine
Adbusters,
published in Vancouver, British Columbia,
and on various websites such as the Culture Jamming Encyclopedia at
Sniggle.net. The ability of culture jammers to imitate and satirize
commercial messages is facilitated in part by the desktop publishing
hardware and software readily available to consumers at relatively modest
prices when compared to the capital-intensive technologies of other
forms of media production, such as print and broadcast. The internet is
another important digital tool for sharing images and information, and it
should come as no surprise then that culture jamming, properly named,
first emerged in San Francisco, near Silicon Valley, and the Pacific North-
west, home of Microsoft.
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Journal of Consumer Culture 6(1)
While much has been written about culture jamming from a
journalistic perspective, sociological analysis has been limited.
1
To help
remedy the situation, this article situates culture jamming squarely in the
tradition of the ‘expressivist turn’, the subjective rejoinder to the instru-
mental rationality of scientific objectivism within what Taylor (1989) terms
‘radical Enlightenment’. Its heritage originates in the mid-18th century
with Rousseau, is then taken up by the German and English Romantic
Movements, and continues on into such phenomena as American transcen-
dentalism, the European avant-garde, and postwar Western counterculture.
Principles of subjective authority embedded in the expressivist tradition
permeate culture jamming. These principles are revealed by examining
culture jamming through the categories of culture, media, and social move-
ments. In the area of culture, culture jamming aligns with the expressivist
quest for authenticity, historically articulated through notions of the natural
as it relates to the objective world and of originality with respect to the
subjective under late modernity, a social condition Giddens (1991) charac-
terizes as highly mediated and consumerist in orientation. In terms of media,
culture jamming endeavors to achieve transparency, that is, to mitigate the
asymmetrical effects of power and other distortions in the communications
apparatus, cutting through the clutter as it were to clarify otherwise obscured
meaning. In this respect, it relates to the culture industry critique of
Frankfurt School thinkers Horkheimer and Adorno ([1944]1996) and their
intellectual heir Habermas ([1962]1989, 1984), as well as to the social
analyses of media pervasiveness undertaken by Debord ([1967]1995) and
Baudrillard (1981), all of whom in some sense cultivate fields originally
sowed by Rousseau. In terms of social movements, culture jamming may be
seen as making a claim of democratic sovereignty relative to the social
contract, engaging in the ‘life politics’ (Giddens, 1991) of self-determination
in the face of an evolving global capitalist system (Sklair, 1991, 2001).
The roots of modern consumerism in Romantic expressive subjectivity
are widely recognized, and these readings usually proceed by counterpos-
ing the emotional release of acts of consumption to the cold calculation
of rational capital accumulation (Campbell, 1989; Miller, 1998; Slater,
1997). That expressive individualism has fueled new consumption patterns
in the wake of critiques of the ‘other-directed’ conformity of mass society
initially mounted in the 1950s by Riesman (1950), Mills (1951) and others
has also been noted (Bellah et al., 1985; Carducci, 2004; Frank, 1997; Holt,
2002). That so-called oppositional or ‘counter’ culture can quickly be recu-
perated by commercial interests and integrated back into the market
system is another often-explored notion (Goldman and Papson, 1998;
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Culture jamming
Heath and Potter, 2004; Hebdige, 1979[1988]). Indeed, a number of
commentators see culture jamming’s attempt to contest consumer society
as ironically offering new sources of distinction for stoking the fires of
consumer desire (Heath and Potter, 2004; Holt, 2002; Kozinets, 2002;
Morris, 2001, see also Klein, 2000: 422–37). Yet by providing an incentive
for producers to respond to socially responsible demands for sustainability
of the environment through ‘green’ products and an end to labor exploita-
tion through fair trade and anti-sweatshop production and distribution,
culture jammers may in fact be performing a beneficial and some might
even say necessary function as a consumer avant-garde (Klein, 2000; Lasn,
1999). From this perspective, culture jamming is an ad hoc form of social
marketing (Kotler and Roberto, 1989); a way of advocating for change in
mindset and behavior.
THE CULTURE IN CULTURE JAMMING
Culture jamming is also known as ‘semiological’ (Dery, 1993) or ‘meme’
(Lasn, 1999) warfare, a contest over meanings and forms of representation,
particularly as propagated in society through various media of communi-
cation. Hence a brief etymology of the concept of culture is useful in
understanding the terrain upon which culture jamming maneuvers.
According to Kroeber and Kluckhohn, the modern use of the word culture
can be traced to the mid-18th century (Kroeber and Kluckhohn, 1952:
145). Its Latin root forms such words as
cultura:
cultivation;
culter:
knife or
plowshare;
cultor:
planter and also worshipper of the gods (hence the
English word ‘cult’), all of which are associated with nature and the earth.
The term first became generally used in German and then spread to other
European languages (Kroeber and Kluckhohn, 1952: 145). English and the
other Romance languages had long used forms of the word civilization to
mean ‘social cultivation, improvement, refinement, or progress’ (Kroeber
and Kluckhohn, 1952: 145). The Latin root of civilization forms words such
as
civis:
citizen, townsman; and
civitas:
state, citizenship, city-state – concepts
associated with society and urbanity in particular.
While the word
kultur
first appears to have come into use in Germany,
it is in France that evidence of the epic dialectical battle between it and
civilise:
civilization, initially emerged. By 1750, Kroeber and Kluckhohn
note, the idea of progress, i.e. modernity, had been established – its basis,
enlightened human reason, i.e., objective rationality, was also acknowledged
(1952: 145). It was in that year that Rousseau fired the opening salvos of
the expressivist riposte against instrumental reason with the publication of
the
Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences,
also known as the
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