Today saw riveting discussion on Gramsci's theory of hegemony, Marx and Engel's views on ideology, and even culture jamming. I have problems with hegemony--I think it fails to explain a broad range of institutional behavior, in fact--but this is the sort of thing I'm reluctant to speak on, because I'm still teasing out what I don't like about it.

My gut reaction to culture jamming is another matter, since in the short term it actually matters.

Culture jamming--the practice of turning mass communication on itself, often in order to send strong anti-consumerist messages--has its roots in the Situationist International, whose antics in turn had roots in radio jamming. Today, culture jamming usually refers to things like Google Bombing, screwing with billboards, and so on. Basically, it entails symbolic protest that on the whole turns out to be pretty amusing to view or watch. There's more to it than this, of course, but I'll leave it to the reader to search more on his or her own.

Important for the purpose of this discussion is that people take it seriously, often having complete faith it its utility and efficacy, and sometimes even treating culture jamming as if it were a revolutionary activity. Writes Asa Wettergren:

Culture jamming appears to be a promising resistance strategy, particularly its specialization in the manipulation of mainstream media and its deconstruction of hegemonic discources. (from "Like Moths to a Flame: Culture Jamming and the Global Spectacle," in Representing Resistance Media, Civil Disobedience, and the Global Justice Movement. Eds: Andy Opel, Donnalyn Pompper, p.28)

I take issue with this, for at least three reasons I can discern.

First, there is the problem that culture jamming is basically the same thing as what it ostensibly challenges. I have in mind both its content and form. Consider Adbusters, the headquarters and bastion of culture jamming efforts in Canada and the United States. On behalf of culture jamming, Adbusters sells anti-Converse shoes (Blackspots), takes out space for anti-consumerist commercials and advertisements, and even sells culture jamming supplies - posters and stickers and such. Selling products seems to be the locus of their strategy, in fact. We have a word for this sort of strategy: capitalism.

Furthermore, by relying on capitalist methods and, presumably, assuming a top-down organizational structure, Adbusters replicates precisely the sort of features of corporations that make them detestable. In other words, it replicates corporate divisions of labor and heirarchy. You can't use capitalist values to subvert capitalism.

I think this is a problem with many counter-culture and counter-institutional "alternatives," in fact. Consumer cooperatives, for instance, seem to me to suffer from the same problem: You might put some sort of abstract power into the hands of consumers, but only on paper. In reality, consumers cooperatives basically replicate the shareholder model of corporations: member-owners are like shareholders, management is like a board of directors or a CEO, and workers are still deprived of self-management. In some cases, the workers are completely screwed, too - many of the workers at Austin's Wheatsville food co-op were cut in a mass firing a year or so back, for instance. Hardly an alternative to the job insecurity that corporations offer.

Second, culture jamming is too sporadic, too spread out, to do anything. A dance party in a Wal-Mart? Buy nothing day? Google bombing? This isn't activism, it's bullshit. And culture jamming certainly doesn't appear to be a "promising resistance strategy" if this is the best it can do. This is profoundly lazy. It's based on the same sort of logic which says that democracy is rolling off the couch once every four years to vote for the lesser of two evils.

I'm not even sure their heart's in the right place. All of this smacks of "good guy" capitalism--which is still capitalism--rather than an alternative to capitalism. And if culture jammers aren't assuming an anti-capitalist framework, to hell with them.

Third, culture jamming is too tame to be revolutionary. I've debated this point this elsewhere with friends. Some of my previous comments on symbolic protest bear on this, I think:

It was put to me by a friend that throwing a brick through a Starbucks window in downtown Seattle was probably more effective than trying to set up a Parecon coffeeshop across the street. My friend's comments were meant to be "a funny reply to Albert's reply against ACME's communique on supporting and rationalizing property destruction in 99 Seattle." I haven't read it, but I imagine it sounds something like the "Open Letter to the Seattle Trashers, the Unions, the Peaceful Protesters, and the Non-Violent Resisters" which appeared in Black Rose's Anarchist Papers. (Vol. 1)

The general critique of property destruction was this: It doesn't raise conciousness, it has practically no effect on free traders, and it allows the media to focus on fringe actors rather than a mass mobilization. In short, it is tactically wrong. Because it was so backward tactically, there were even concerns that some of the storefront destroyers were nothing but cops and other agent provocateurs who had joined the crowd of demonstrators in order to discredit it.

The relevant portion of my response was:

... I disagree that throwing a brick through a window is more effective than creating autonomous workplaces. You break a window, a corporation is out a few hundred dollars. It might work if you broke all of their windows every time they decided to repair them, which forced them to shut down. I could totally get behind that.

One, though? Or even several on one day of the year? I wouldn't be surprised if they turn it around as an example of how "edgy" they are, kind of like how Urban Outfitters sells Banksy books in their store on the Drag. But creating non-hierarchical, non-coercive, (relatively) autonomous workplaces that not only put economic vision to the test but help people put food on the table? The difference between the two isn't even debatable. There's a reason that corporations can use black bloc imagery, anarcho-punk, Che, and all these other things in their marketing schemes - they're all pretty chic, and don't really offer examples of alternatives to capitalism. In other words, they're non-threatening, so they can go ahead, throw them out there into the public consciousness, and exploit these images in advertisements. Who cares what a bunch of escapists and counter-culture types do? It won't matter in the long run.

But have you seen a major corporation try to identify with workplace democracy? Or balanced job complexes? Or expropriation? Or with collective endeavors or federated communities and workplaces that could replace the state in all its functions? Maybe I'm sheltered, but I haven't. And the reason you won't see these ideas exploited by corporations, and which are at the core of constructive anarchist and syndicalist thought, is that for corporations, this imagery is much more suicidal to propagate than black bloc members causing property damage.

I'm not saying property damage shouldn't be ruled out. I completely agree with Gelderloos and Churchill when they argue that nonviolence is racist, protects the state, etc. But if asked which matters more for both radicals on the ground and, say, welfare mothers, I'm going to have to go with workers' self management and other, constructive efforts to build the institutions we need to live freely. If we're not interested in workers' self-management, in creating some sort of bottom-up socialism or communism, then what is the alternative to capitalism? Destroying the state-corporate nexus and then foraging? This anti-civ/primitivist strain is not compelling, and completely reactionary.

This is somewhat off topic, but I'm feeling a bit lazy at the moment. Hopefully it opens other roads of discussion. I think the point about corporations co-opting radical imagery is also a strong criticism of culture jamming. 

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