25.3.05
Culture Jamming
Culture Jamming - a War on Brands
The Adbusters Media Foundation (AMF) describe themselves and their goals like this; "We are a global network of artists, writers, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to launch the new social activist movement of the information age. Our goal is to galvanize resistance against those who would destroy the environment, pollute our minds and diminish our lives. .. We want a world in which the economy and ecology resonate in balance. We try to coax people from spectator to participant in this quest. We want folks to get mad about corporate disinformation, injustices in the global economy, and any industry that pollutes our physical or mental commons."(14) AMF publishes the quarterly magazine "Adbusters" and the website www.adbusters.org, as well as offer its services through the advertising agency Powershift, which claims only to take on campaigns for organisations with goals corresponding to AMFs own. Kalle Lasn runs AMF, and has recently published "Culture Jam" to explain the movement and give instructions in how to live an uncommercialised life.
The Adbusters magazine is like an exquisitely wrapped piece of barbed wire. Thick paper, stylish visual layout; like the jammed advertisements it resembles something it's not - a glossy fashion or lifestyle magazine. Open it, and the barbed wire's sting is found in articles that seek to expose the underlying tactics and tools used when promoting brands or expound on brands' dangerous influence. The just as stylish website contains, apart from Adbusters magazine excerpts, information on AMF campaigns, such as the annual TV-turnoff week, and coverage on other culture jamming activities.
Inspiration - a Line of Revolutionaries
Lasn cites the French avant-garde group The Situationists as his inspiration. As a movement existing in the 50s and 60s, it was critical to the influence of the modern media culture, or what they called the spectacle of modern life. This omnipresent phenomenon, everything from billboards to art exhibitions to TV, refused human beings the experience of the authentic(15). It had kidnapped our real lives. Kalle Lasn of The Media Foundation, a Canadian-based culture jamming organisation, uses this line of rhetoric in justifying an attack on commercial brands when he says: "Culture jamming is, at root, just a metaphor for stopping the flow of spectacle long enough to adjust your set." or "..breaking the syntax, and replacing it with a new one. The new syntax carries the instructions for a whole new way of being in the world."(16)
The final goal is a cultural revolution, or in Lasn's words, "an about-face in our values, lifestyles and institutional agendas. A reinvention of the American dream."(17) He sees the current culture jamming movement as part of a "revolutionary continuum that includes, .. , early punk rockers, the 60s hippie movement, ..the Situationists.., whose chief aim was to challenge the prevailing ethos in a way that was so primal and heartfelt it could only be true."(18) The revolution depicted by Lasn is one where the media-consumer trance is broken, the power of corporations seriously weakened and authenticity rediscovered. In fact, this also places culture jammers on a continuum of youth rebelling against the status quo, where the young rebel against the old and established before they fade into complacent middle age and in turn are challenged by the next generation of youth.
Détournement
The culture jammers of today borrow more from the Situationists, and more specifically Guy Debord, when they speak of détournement as their main tool. The action of détournement means to lift an image, message or artefact out of its context to create a new meaning(19). The most advanced culture jams are counter-messages that mimic the corporation's own method of communication, and sends a message, a subvertisement, starkly at odds with the one originally intended. Often, but not always, the brand name or logo is slightly altered, but the visual recognition is still assured. The Nike parody at the top of page 1 is a good example of this. The culture jammers call this "a re-routing of images to reclaim them and to devalue the currency of commercial images"(20). The Billboard Liberation Front jams advertisement billboards, like the simple, but powerful jam on Exxon that appeared just after the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, "Shit happens - New Exxon" or on a billboard originally advertising Gordon's Gin, "Gordon's Gin - It Fucks You Up".
Using Saussure's framework, this can be explained as adding negative messages to the sign's signifier, and the goal is that consumers will include these messages when they go through their sensemaking cycles. Promotion transfers meaning on to a product from the outside(21) and it is this process that the culture jamming seeks to enter, by jamming the original coherence between the message sent through product design, packaging and promotional messages. The acts of culture jamming are thus intended to throw a spanner into the integrated system of production/promotion which, by the corporations, are deployed together in a mutually referring and self-confirming way.
http://www.anthrobase.com/Browse/Aut/index.html
