by Anne Elizabeth-Moore
01.15.03

ulture jamming, the process by which individuals revolt against the appearance of corporate interests in public space, is one of the past decade’s liveliest activist fashion trends. With methods ranging from altering existing ads (“adbusting”) to organizing public-space reclamation parties, from airing TV “subvertisements” intended to promote the decrease of consumption to performing “cultural interventions,” culture jammers already claim to be changing the world.

Although this “new” activism has been popularized by Kalle Lasn, publisher of Adbusters and author of Culture Jam, it was Negativland who originally coined the term “culture jamming” in 1984. In the 1995 film Sonic Outlaws, bandmember Mark Hosler describes the practice as a “totally natural response to growing up in a mediated world.” Culture jamming intends to fight The Powers That Be by exerting control, literally and physically, over the public sphere. Don’t like a certain advertisement? Change it. Have a problem with the media? Become it. Reform it. … and, ultimately, emulate it.

Marketing specialists, currently struggling to appeal to a public that has learned to engage more actively with media and disregard traditional commercial appeals, have taught jammers some important new lessons. Or is it the other way around? No matter.

New marketing methods vary as widely as the list of culture jamming activities, and for good reason: both marketing and anti-marketing work from exactly the same principles. In essence, much of what we call culture jamming achieves the same effect as traditional marketing. It’s just being done by activists—for a fraction of the cost to the corporate beneficiaries.

While Naomi Klein, author of No Logo, describes the ethos of culture jamming as “go-for-the-corporate-jugular,” she stops short of noting that the “jugulars” of corporations are not their advertisements, brand names, commercials or representations—the things culture jamming targets. Corporate lifeblood is profit, and profit comes from name recognition—the same currency trafficked in by culture jammers.

Parody as Politics

onsider the mission statement of one culture jamming group, Guerrilla Media: “Using satire as our main political tool, we primarily create and widely distribute parodies of daily newspapers, and government and corporate promotional materials.” Their projects have included what they refer to as “actions” on NAFTA, welfare reform, cuts to social programming and environmental concerns. “We use humor as a means to expose powerful interests,” their Web site states. As they discuss their work, we see that activism, culture jamming, politics, parody and satire are all interchangeable in the jammers’ vocabulary.

Parody and satire are technically different: although both imitate subjects for comic effect or ridicule, satire can be said to embody a more political intent, as it not only imitates for amusement but also in order to attack folly or stupidity. However, like other forms of humor, such as lampoons, spoofs and take-offs, the aims of both are primarily to amuse, and the methods are imitative in nature. “Adbusting,” “subvertising” and many of the other “creative actions” embodied by culture jamming are each a kind of parody. The question remains regarding how parody is used to influence politics

Lasn’s descriptions of “memes” is central. Memes are bits of information (“a catchphrase,” for example, as he refers to them in his book) that compete against each other for popularity. The most popular memes infect society and shape our understandings of it in crucial ways. Too many self-evident examples exist to list here. Come the revolution, or as he calls it in Culture Jam, “World War III,” Lasn suggests we “build our own meme factory, put out a better product and beat them at their own game.”

Not very well hidden beneath the surface of Lasn’s suggestion is the acceptance that “beat[ing] them at their own game” means accepting the rules, the playing field and the score-keeping system as they are presented.

Culture jambusting

arodic newspapers such as The Onion similarly parrot government, national or general stupidity (“Area Man Has Naked-Lady Fetish,” for example, or “Black Guy Photoshopped In”). This, of course, is humor. The problem with The Onion is not in its use of humor; the problem is in how that humor resounds in the larger culture.

The objects of parody act more as “muses” than objects of debasement; the articles are more “inspired by” than “attacking.” Thus, it is not difficult to see, culture jamming, adbusting and parody in general not only reassert the icons they half-heartedly attempt to dismantle, they encourage their continued survival.

More dangerously, with a (very smart) move toward self-parody in advertising, marketers have created a system that allows consumers to perceive an extremely high degree of negative messaging as straightforward advertising.

This system is described most succinctly in Sonic Outlaws, which outlines the various legal battles that surrounded Negativland’s attempted 1991 release of a satirical record called U2. Musician John Oswald explains that a work that mimics or quotes a known original “doesn’t necessarily degrade or devalue the original. In cases of people like James Brown, it actually is of great advertising value to the original.” That is, when certain mimicked figures or products have achieved a certain status, parody no longer affects them negatively. The consumer retains the potential to read even parodied ads as legitimate advertising.

The Choice of a New Generation

he response of PepsiCo to Negativland’s 1997 album Dispepsi provides a clear example of how parody can feed into corporate interests.

Even before the release of their album, which both appropriates and satirizes Pepsi advertisements in highly critical ways, Negativland and the band’s supporters were preparing for a fierce legal battle. Having recently extricated themselves from a four-year struggle over the U2 project, the band was contacted early on by attorneys offering legal assistance. Although never used in court, the arguments they prepared for the case suggest precisely why Pepsi wouldn’t—and didn’t—mount a legal battle over the album, despite its near-blasphemous message and technically illegal production methods.

Describing Dispepsi in a December 2002 personal interview, Hosler referred to the use of the product in the work as “this sort of ultimately insane product placement.” Hosler told Stephen Thompson, in a September 3, 1997, interview with The Onion, “When you finish listening to our record, the one thing that sticks in your mind is the one thing all companies want you to remember when you see their ads. They want you to remember the name of their product. That’s all.” That the band had done so in a mocking and criminal way didn’t force PepsiCo into legal action. In fact, as Hosler stressed in the December interview, it didn’t “do anything.”

The Vicious Cycle

o, let’s recap: Corporate and government follies are created; culture warriors mock them. Government and corporate officials see the value in the placement of their work, however ironically, before a new, ironic audience. The targets of this work allow such ironic mocking to continue unabated, even adopting similar marketing methods themselves. Soon, ads come along pre-culture-jammed, already graffittied with a “subversive” message in Spraypaint^TM font. Culture jamming, or, more specifically, its definition as a political tool, has created an immediately co-optable antimarketing strategy that activists can no longer make effective use of. As a method of political action, culture jamming—because of its central reliance on parody as politically effective—has already failed.

Parody fails as a political tool because, in agreeing to use it, activists agree to use a pre-established set of symbols, each containing within it the very message activists work to combat. The processes of adbusting and subvertising, for example, support public space—or “advertising space”—as a place to receive information quickly and easily; adbusting and subvertising thus support that advertising works.

Lasn suggests fighting memes with more memes: “Whoever has the memes has the power,” Lasn asserts—with a meme of his own—in Culture Jam. Culture jamming is dangerous because it doesn’t get at the heart of the meme problem, which is that humans use memes as access to pure, unreproachable information.

Now what?

ulture jamming and adbusting, parody and satire are not useless. They are simply not useful as tools for political change. As Klein notes in No Logo, “ads co-opt out of reflex—they do so because consuming is what consumer culture does.” The co-optation of anti-advertising can’t be quelled by bigger and better anti-ads and it can’t be stopped by mocking, parodying or even becoming the media in the way that Lasn seems to suggest.

If we can figure out how to make individual responses to consumer culture clearer, we might hope to end the re-presentation of brands and dogmas entirely. Then, while the playing field will be far from level, at least we’ll have space in our brains to conceive of something that is unbranded, unrepresented and uncontrolled. Control, after all, is the central issue. The difference, as things now stand, between control by Burger King^TM and Adbusters^TM seems negligible when you’d prefer to remain uncontrolled.

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