Culture Jamming and Resistance in the Life World-- Promoting Critical Postures in Public Spheres. 2008.pdf

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Culture Jamming and Resistance in the Life World:
Promoting Critical Postures in Public Spheres
A student paper submitted to the
Popular Communication Division
of the International Communication Association
for consideration of presentation at the
2008 Convention
Abstract
This essay argues that culture jamming, as a creative communication process,
promotes agency and critical interpretation within individuals. By applying Karlyn Kohrs
Campbell’s notion of agency, along with ideas from Adorno’s “culture industry”, to
Habermas’s public sphere model the praxis of culture jamming can be explored. Culture
jamming is not only an example of agency in action, it is also a form of resistance which
encourages and triggers agency in others.
2
“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream
by night in the dusty recesses of their minds
wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but
the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they
may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.”
1
-T.E. Lawrence
Where ever the eye can come to rest has become a potential site for advertising.
The clothes people wear, billboards in traffic; the presence and placement of familiar
corporate logos integrate themselves into the subtle fabric of daily life. The bombardment
of media even steps into public restrooms and facilities to do advertising work.
While the public sphere can be thought of as a place where public actors and agents
carry out and engage in communication exchanges, there are other pervasive forces and
interested parties at work. There are corporate players and purveyors in the public sphere
who are concerned very little with fostering public debate. These forces see the public
sphere as an advertising playground and potential site to reach markets, rather than a space
for communicative action and understanding.
While scholars argue the potential theoretical flaws and assumptions concerning the
public sphere, it is still a space in which discourses are invented, exchanged, and have
influence. What is crucial for citizens engaged and participating within the public sphere is
a critical awareness, a type of posture which empowers individuals with agency and
efficacy. In order to understand what this posture might look like and how it potentially
functions this essay argues that critics and scholars take a different approach to
understanding the phenomenon of culture jamming.
2
Culture jamming is a creative
communication process that takes advantage of existing forms of communication mediums,
and alters the content or messages traveling through these mediums to create an alternative
3
perspective.
3
This creative communication process empowers both the agent conducting
the “jam” and the individuals whom experience the phenomenon by displaying critical
agency in action. By executing, witnessing or interpreting the phenomenon of culture
jamming a critical and active posture is promoted. (While there are many tactical forms of
culture jamming, for immediate examples refer to the photographs on pages 4, 15, 22.)
Agency will be framed by borrowing from both Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and
Theodor Adorno, providing the insight necessary to navigate between the “culture
industry” and the “public sphere.” Upon critiquing various aspects of Habermas’s model,
attention will shift to exhuming the influence culture jamming has upon agency and
efficacy. This essay argues that culture jamming ought to be viewed and discussed in
terms of a
telos,
towards promoting critical postures and attitudes within citizens.
From Campbell to Culture Jamming
The relationship between agency and culture jamming is an intimate one.
Campbell reminds us that “the term ‘agency’ is polysemic and ambiguous,” but that there
is, and has been, a relationship between persuasion and symbolic action.
4
For Campbell,
agency: 1) “is communal and participatory”; 2) “is ‘invented’ by authors who are points of
articulation”; 3) “emerges in artistry or craft”; 4) “is effected through form”; 5) “ is
perverse…open to reversal.”
5
Rhetorical agency then “refers to the capacity to act, that is,
to have the competence to speak or write in a way that will be recognized or heeded by
others in one’s community.”
6
Culture jamming takes this notion of agency one step
forward by actually applying it and putting agency into praxis. Dery unpacks the
metaphor:
4
“Jamming” is CB slang for the illegal practice of
interrupting radio broadcasts or conversations between
fellow hams with lip farts, obscenities, and other equally
jejune hijinx. Culture jamming, by contrast, is directed
against an ever more intrusive, instrumental technoculture
whose operant mode is the manufacture of consent through
the manipulation of symbols.
7
Culture jamming becomes not only a speech act, but also triggers a sort of critical literacy
in action.
The parallels between culture jamming and Campbell’s criteria are immediate and
inherent. Culture jamming takes full advantage of the “communal and participatory”
notion of agency. Campbell notes that “agency can be understood as the ways in which
individuals accept, negotiate, and resist the subject-positions available to them at a given
moment in a particular culture.”
9
These “subject-positions” are not static for Campbell or
5

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