Pranking Rhetoric: "Culture Jamming" as Media Activism

Christine Harold’s article explores the phenomenon of culture jamming as a method of protest and subversion. Culture jamming is explained as appropriating the tools and conventions of the mass media and marketing in order to take advantage of the resources and venues they afford. Culture jammers see their process as attempting to ‘liberate’ and undermine the rhetoric of the mass media. However, in doing so, jammers engage in the same rhetoric and devices that the mass media takes advantage of. Harold, with reference to Bakhtin, claims that engaging with the rhetoric and devices of the mass media simply perpetuates the ‘rhetorical binaries’. In this period of late capitalism or post modernity, Jameson sees that parody has found itself without a vocation and instead pastiche has taken over. Pastiche, is for Jameson, ‘the imitation of a peculiar or unique’ but without parody’s ulterior motives. It is a ‘blank parody’.

While Harold alludes to this movement towards pastiche, she fails to directly take her thesis towards this point. Arguably, culture jamming has become no longer a parody, but rather a pastiche. Jameson’s exploration of pastiche refers to a wider analysis of society, however, this exploration is equally applicable to the process of resistance and subversion of the dominant powers that is embodied by culture jamming. Pastiche transforms the world into sheer images of itself and for pseodu-events and ‘spectacles’. The classic example in contemporary marketing is the process of ‘viral advertising’. Once a process of subversion and resistance, viral campaigns creates a desire amongst consumers to consumer the ‘spectacle’ itself. The issue becomes, as Guy Debord explains, ‘the image has become the final form of commodity reification.’ And as we all know, reification is an inescapable hegemonic form as it serves to subsume everything within itself. Culture jamming fails to break down reification, as Lyotard would suggest, by playing into the opponent’s strategy.

The only way to disrupt the hegemony of marketing and the mass media would be to make a Lyotardian move. Most culture jamming practices serve to stand outside to compete against and escape the mass media. This simply reinforces the binary rhetoric of the mass media. Indeed, if we are living in a period marked by control as Deleuze and Jameson suggest, our actions and reactions are observed within the framework of the dominant. However, Harold suggests that control offers new opportunities for political protest. Harold uses the example of Skaggs who utilizes hoaxes in the knowledge that they will be taken on by the mass media. So rather than attempt to situation himself outside and apart from the media, he situations himself firmly within the media in order to provide a subversion. In this way, pranking provides an invaluable method of subversion. Where culture jamming attempts to differentiate itself from ‘culture’, pranks occur within the dominant in order to provide a subversion. Indeed, pranks address ‘patterns of power rather than its contents.’ Pranks, by their very nature serve to disrupt hegemonic forces. In acting from within the dominant, pranks can unravel the rhetoric of the dominant. It is not enough to engage with an outright confrontation and battle against the mass media. These are simply reactional counter moves. As Lyotard poetically puts it:

Reactional countermoves are not more than programmed effects in the opponent’s strategy; they play into his hands and thus have no effect on the balance if power. That is why it is important to increase displacements in the games, and even to disorientate it, in such a way as to make an unexpected ‘move’ (a new statement).

Questions:

· Does marketing still maintain its hegemonic status

· Does pranking offer a chance to disrupt the balance of power?

o If so, where does this balance of power lie?

o Do we need to prank on the internet? If so, how do we prank the internet when the internet is perceived as an ‘open’ forum, rather than the closed hegemonic structures of the mass media?

· How does Culture Jamming and pranking play out on the internet?

o Is the internet ‘branded’?

· Do we agree with Jameson’s notion that resistance has become commodified?

o If so, what options are available to those wanting to subvert hegemonic powers (especially online)?

o Is it possible to follow Lyotard’s calls and make an unexpected move that doesn’t play into the oppositions hand?

o How does Deleuze and Foucault’s concept of control extend onto the internet? If the internet enables greater freedoms, how does it allow a greater control through modulation of every aspect of life?