Harold, Christine. 2004. Pranking Rhetoric-- “Culture Jamming” as Media Activism. Critical Studies in Media Communication 21 no.3.pdf

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Critical Studies in Media Communication
Vol. 21, No. 3, September 2004, pp. 189–211
Pranking Rhetoric: “Culture
Jamming” as Media Activism
Christine Harold
This essay explores the practice of “culture jamming” as a strategy of rhetorical protest.
Specifically, “pranksters” deploy the tools of the mass media and marketing in order to
take advantage of the resources and venues they afford. Through the concept of
“pranking,” this essay suggests that the most promising forms of media activism may
resist less through negation and opposition than by playfully
appropriating
commercial
rhetoric both by folding it over on itself and exaggerating its tropes.
“Pranks aren’t reactive like acts of revenge. They don’t punish, they pro-
voke.… Revenge is a science, pranking is an art.” (Reverend Al, of the Cacophony
Society pranking group, quoted in Branwyn, 1997, p. 277)
“Illusion is a revolutionary weapon.” (Burroughs, 1998, p. 284)
In late 2003,
Adbusters,
the activist magazine known for its parodic
“subvertisments” and scathing critiques of consumer culture, launched its most
ambitious anti-branding campaign yet. Its “Blackspot” sneaker, an unassuming black
canvas shoe, with a large white spot where one would expect a corporate logo, is
intended to “uncool” sportswear giant Nike by offering an ethically produced
alternative to the Nike swoosh. The magazine’s first goal is to challenge Nike’s
controversial CEO by way of a full-page ad in
The New York Times
declaring:
Phil Knight had a dream. He’d sell shoes. He’d sell dreams. He’d get rich. He’d use
sweatshops if he had to. Then along came the new shoe. Plain. Simple. Cheap. Fair.
Designed for only one thing. Kicking Phil’s ass. The Unswoosher. (Blackspot website,
2004)
Adbusters
is also encouraging its readers to help spread the “Blackspot virus” by
Christine Harold is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Speech Communication at the University of
Georgia. Correspondence to: 110 Terrell Hall, Athens, GA 30602, U.S. Email: charold@uga.edu. This article
was drawn from a dissertation completed at Pennsylvania State University under the direction of Stephen H.
Browne. Portions of this essay were presented at the 2003 National Communication Association convention
in Miami, Florida and the 2003 Argumentation Conference in Alta, Utah. The author is especially grateful to
Marco Abel, Bonnie Dow, and Ken Rufo for their helpful feedback on the arguments presented in this essay.
ISSN 0739–3180 (print)/ISSN 1479-5809 (online)
2004 National Communication Association
DOI: 10.1080/0739318042000212693
190
C. Harold
graffiti-ing black spots on Niketown windows and displays across the U.S. and
Canada. Although it remains to be seen whether the campaign will, as
Adbusters
hopes, “set a precedent that will revolutionize capitalism” (Blackspot, 2004), to date
well over 200 independent shoe stores and 4000 individuals have placed orders for
the shoes, and Blackspot was featured in
The New York Times Magazine’s
special
“Year in Ideas” issue as one of the “best ideas of 2003.”
Adbusters
is at the forefront of an insurgent political movement known loosely as
“culture jamming.” This movement seeks to undermine the marketing rhetoric of
multinational corporations, specifically through such practices as media hoaxing,
corporate sabotage, billboard “liberation,” and trademark infringement. Ad parodies,
popularized through magazines such as
Adbusters
and
Stay Free!
and countless
websites, are by far the most prevalent of culture jamming strategies. Ad parodies
attempting to serve as rhetorical x-rays, revealing the “true logic” of advertising, are
a common way for so-called “subvertisers” to talk back to the multimedia spectacle
of corporate marketing. An
Adbusters
parody of Calvin Klein’s “heroin chic” ads of
the mid-1990s, for example, features a female model hunched over a toilet, vomiting,
presumably to maintain her waifish figure. The ad tells viewers that women are
dissatisfied with their own bodies because “the beauty industry is the beast.” In
another, Joe Chemo, a cancer-ridden cartoon camel, derides the infamous Joe Camel
campaign and a Tommy Hilfiger spoof depicts his customers as sheep, wanting only
to “follow the flock.” The Gap’s infamous appropriation of the likenesses of
counter-culture heroes Jack Kerouac and James Dean to sell khaki pants inspired a
similar response from the adbusting community. To the Gap’s claim that “Kerouac
wore khakis,” a group of Australian subvertisers responded with the likeness of
another 20th century icon who wore khakis as well—Adolf Hitler. As such, Gap
khakis were recoded as a means not to rugged individuality but genocidal totalitar-
ianism—the conformist impulse writ large.
Ad parodies such as these might be categorized as a strategy of rhetorical sabotage,
an attempt to impede the machinery of marketing.
Adbusters’
own “culture jammer’s
manifesto,” for example, declares: “We will jam the pop-culture marketers and bring
their image factory to a sudden, shuddering halt” (Lasn, 1999, p. 128). The industrial
imagery here is telling. It invokes the most traditional target of sabotage—the
factory. Historically, sabotage, or monkey-wrenching, has been a dominant opposi-
tional response to industrial power. The word “sabotage,” according to Merriam-
Webster’s dictionary (1993), emerged in Europe around 1910, at the height of the
industrial revolution. Indeed, it is a term that is inextricably linked to industrial
capitalism. The first definition of sabotage offered in Webster’s is the “destruction of
an employer’s property or the hindering of manufacturing by discontented workers.”
Webster’s explains that the word comes from “sabot,” the name for the wooden
shoes worn in many European countries in the 19th century. “Saboter,” then, meant
“to clatter with sabots” or to “botch,” presumably by throwing one’s wooden shoes
into the machinery. “Sabotage” means literally to “clog” with one’s clogs.
I suggest that while the advertising sabotage articulated by
Adbusters
is not
without some rhetorical value, it does little to address the rhetoric of contemporary
Pranking Rhetoric
191
marketing—a mode of power that is quite happy to oblige subversive rhetoric and
shocking imagery. Indeed, parody and irony are the dominant motifs of many
successful mass-marketing campaigns. Through a kind of nudge-and-wink knowing-
ness, Madison Avenue culture jammers make every effort to subvert traditional
advertising tropes—selling, as cultural critic Thomas Frank (1997) has put it, edgy
brands as tickets to the rhetorical “lynching” of consumerism. As Fredric Jameson
(1991) has famously argued, the cultural logic that accompanies this era of late
capitalism is defined by a codification of the eccentric modernist styles of resistance.
For example, contemporary advertising is teeming with the language of revolution.
But, as Jameson points out, these flagrantly rebellious styles “ostentatiously deviate
from a norm which then reasserts itself, in a not necessarily unfriendly way, by a
systematic mimicry of their willful eccentricities” (1991, p. 16). In other words,
parody becomes one of many social codes—codes that are as available to the
capitalist as they are to the artist—and, as such “finds itself without vocation” (p. 16)
as a rhetoric of protest in late capitalism.
Further, I want to suggest that despite its deconstructive sensibility, parody, an
example of what Mikhail Bakhtin (1984) would describe as turning the world upside
down, perpetuates a commitment to rhetorical binaries—the hierarchical form it
supposedly wants to upset. The frustration expressed by
Adbusters’
readers (if the
magazine’s often scathing letters section is any indication) implies that being told
what is best for them is no more welcome coming from
Adbusters
than it is coming
from advertisers. This may be, in part, because the parodic form neglects what
literary theorist Jeffrey Nealon (1993, p. 30) calls the “crucial operation” of decon-
struction,
reinscribing
oppositions—for example, health/sickness or authenticity/con-
formity—back into a larger textual field. Hence parody, as negative critique, is not
up to the task of undermining the parodist’s own purchase on the Truth as it
maintains both a hierarchy of language and the protestor’s role as revealer. Parody
derides the
content
of what it sees as oppressive rhetoric, but fails to attend to its
patterns.
In this essay, I explore the rhetorical strategies of an alternative sort of culture
jammer—the prankster—who resists less through negating and opposing dominant
rhetorics than by playfully and provocatively folding existing cultural forms in on
themselves. The prankster performs an art of rhetorical jujitsu, in an effort to
redirect the resources of commercial media toward new ends. In what follows, I first
detail the theoretical frame through which I engage the political art of culture
jamming including why, specifically, the prankster’s ethic may offer a more compel-
ling response than parody to contemporary cultural and economic forces. Second, in
an effort to explore pranking in action I offer three contemporary case studies of
radical and mainstream efforts to hijack popular media forms: the culture jamming
collective
ark (pronounced “artmark”); the San Francisco-based Biotic Baking
Brigade; and the American Legacy Foundation’s INFKT Truth campaign. Finally, I
conclude by suggesting that although pranking strategies do perform the Aristotelian
notion of exploiting available means, for them to be fully imagined as rhetoric,
rhetoric itself may have to be somewhat recalibrated in its role as a mass-mediated
192
C. Harold
political art. As I will discuss, although culture jamming should not be seen as a
replacement for more traditional modes of civic engagement, the playful and
disruptive strategies of the prankster have much to offer social justice movements in
the so-called “post-industrial” era.
Intensifying Media Forms: A Theory of Culture Jamming
The term “culture jamming” is based on the CB slang word “jamming” in which one
disrupts existing transmissions. It usually implies an interruption, a sabotage, hoax,
prank, banditry, or blockage of what are seen as the monolithic power structures
governing cultural life. Like Umberto Eco’s “semiological guerrillas” (1986, p. 135),
culture jammers seek to “introduce noise into the signal” that might otherwise
obliterate alternatives to it (Dery, 1993). Culture jamming is usually described as a
kind of “glutting” of the system; it is an amping up of contradictory rhetorical
messages in an effort to engender a qualitative change. In this sense, jamming need
not be seen only as a damming, or a stopping of corporate media, as
Adbusters’
monkey-wrenching imagery implies. Rather, it may be more useful to consider
jamming as an artful proliferation of messages, a rhetorical process of intervention
and invention, which challenges the ability of corporate discourses to make meaning
in predictable ways.
Many contemporary culture jammers describe themselves as political heirs to the
Situationists, a group of avant-garde artists that flourished in 1950s and 1960s
Europe. The Situationists were committed to detouring pre-existing political and
commercial rhetorics in an effort to subvert and reclaim them. For the Situationists,
led by
Society of the Spectacle
author Guy Debord, everyday life was being overrun
by the Spectacle, a novel mode of social domination in which the industrial age’s
coercive manual labor was replaced by capitalism’s deceitful promise of fulfillment
through entertainment and consumption. Their main strategy,
detournement,
was an
´
effort to “devalue the currency of the Spectacle” (Lasn, 1999, p. 108) that they
claimed had kidnapped authentic life. Examples include everything from rewording
conversations between popular comic strip characters, to reworking the sign on a
storefront, to making subversive collages out of familiar commercial and govern-
ment images.
Detournement
can be translated as “detour” or “diversion” but other,
´
more subtle meanings in the French include “hijacking,” “embezzlement,”
“corruption,” and “misappropriation” (Sadler, 1999). Although many ad parodists,
such as those at
Adbusters,
see themselves as carrying the revolutionary mantle of the
Situationists, Debord and his comrades were decidedly opposed to parody as an
effective rhetorical strategy, because it maintained, rather than unsettled, audiences’
purchase on truth.
As I have mentioned, a major limitation of the adbuster’s reliance on parody as
a revelatory device is that this device has been enthusiastically embraced by mar-
keters as well. This insistence on revealing a hidden truth also becomes a problem
for other reasons. Such an insistence disallows a forceful response to what it faces
because it can only
react.
It is a rhetoric that resentfully tells its audience “Things are
not as they should be” without affirming possible alternatives. Saying no is itself an
Pranking Rhetoric
193
often satisfying alternative, but it is hardly one on which to build a lasting political
movement.
The no-sayer is, in essence, yoked in a dialectic tug of war with the rhetoric it
negates.
Adbusters’
Blackspot sneaker campaign, for example, may be more proactive
than its subvertisements (Adbusters is, for example, proposing to build a “clean”
factory in China should the campaign succeed), but the rhetorical message is similar.
It is mobilized, first and foremost, by a desire to “kick Phil’s ass.” Second, then,
because the no-sayer has not challenged the essential form of the binary, one can
never negate adequately by its own, dialectical standards. A rhetoric that is defined
by negation must always encounter more boundaries that must be overcome. More
transgression is always required, which inevitably produces more cynicism and
resentment. Certainly, saying no is sometimes a crucial political strategy. However,
I suggest that asceticism may not be an effective intervention into the scintillating
world of consumer culture; and ironically, by ardently pursuing the authentic realm
“out there,” one plays one’s role as consumer in the fullest possible sense, endlessly
chasing after something just beyond reach.
Finally—and most crucial for the discussion of pranking that follows—whereas
parody may have significant impact in certain rhetorical situations, it should not be
seen as a transhistorical category that is inherently subversive; primarily because
capitalism itself is not a transhistorical system. It is constantly taking new shapes and
producing different kinds of effects. A specific conversation between two theorists of
contemporary capitalism, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, offers a productive
model through which to conceptualize the political practices of culture jamming
(Deleuze, 1990). Foucault and Deleuze conceived contemporary capitalism as under-
going a shift from
disciplinarity
to
control.
Under disciplinary societies, most
famously theorized by Foucault, previously feudalist modes of production were
brought together, organized, and confined in order to maximize efficiency and
profit. Disciplinary societies operate primarily through the confinement and atom-
ization of individuals (for example, through the familiar models of the prison, the
classroom, or the factory). This was the mode of power most appropriate to a
Fordist world in which assembly-line style production was the most efficient way for
capital to expand. Fordism required a certain level of
standardization
to function.
Workers were more or less interchangeable and labor practices were repeated with
as little variation as possible. Concurrently, the advertising industry emerged to
standardize the consumers who would make up the markets for these newly mass
produced products.
Deleuze pursues Foucault’s acknowledgement late in his career that the West is
now undergoing a transformation from the disciplinarity necessary for an industrial
economy to a service economy organized, in part, through the increased control of
consumer desires. Control societies do not operate through the confinement and
silencing of individuals but “through continuous control and communication”
(1990, p. 174). That is, people are not denied access to information and knowledges
but are granted ever greater access to them through the opening up of technologies
and the hybridization of institutions. However, what might appear as new freedoms

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