Culture Jamming

So this is the first of four posts dedicated to some of the final articles we’ve had to read for the course. This post will focus on the Bart Cammaerts article, Jamming the Political: Beyond Counter-hegemonic Practices

There’s a paragraph towards the end of the essay that really made me think, and will help me make sense of a couple points I have. Cammaerts said the following:

“Furthermore, as has been shown, jammers focusing on politics are much more diverse ideologically and also voice sentiments of hatred and violence, essentializing entire (religious) communities and populations. This is far removed from the revolutionary ideals of the Fluxus and Situationist legacies that saw in de´tournement away of inciting citizens to think differently by engaging with them within their everyday life contexts. However, in a world of green-washing, spin and other newspeaks—the true is a moment of the false—the jam is no longer inherently progressive, it no longer fosters the ideals of the Enlightenment, and nor does it automatically challenge the status quo or strive to extend rights for citizens at large. Some political actors, as well as companies, just use jamming techniques as a ‘hip’ political communication strategy, thereby reducing it to a marketing technique—unjamming the jam so to speak. Others use it to demonize and essentialize a common enemy or ethnic/religious minority. For mainstream broadcasters, jamming is often ‘just entertainment’. It therefore remains important not to be too celebratory about these phenomena and take into account Baudrillard’s (1987) criticism that media create an over-saturated hyper-reality that can potentially lead to the implosion of meaning, whereby the jam represents merely another ‘noise’ amongst other noises.”

From this section, I really got the sense that culture jamming has it its peak. It sounds like it has stopped being a tool just for the people who want to change for the better, and become a “tool” for just anyone. When someone engages in a culture jam, let’s say in a political/celebrity context, they’re are attributed a “subversive” and “hip” status, which was not the original intention of the culture of jamming. On the other hand, when groups promote hate, they are contributing to stereotypes of culture jamming being a tool for vandals, or those that want to hurt society. I don’t want to say terrorists, but perhaps people that would engage in a type of cultural terrorism. Cammaerts uses some good examples of poster campaigns, where sometimes the culture jam is used to critique the Bush administration, but then some also racially profile others. Misuses of culture jamming is a sign that it has gone beyond its original intention, and is now being handled by many. To me this is a sign of how universal a culture jam might be, but it also shows how it has gone, as the title says, beyond couter-hegemonic practices.

I also think that the fact that culture jamming has lost a lot of impact it was initially supposed to have. The composites of George W. Bush and Osama Bin Laden’s faces, or the South Park picture, or the creation of a Plane attack on Mecca, seem to me to be a part of a culture of internet comedy. I understand that some of these might be created in order to promote thought on the subject matter of war and terrorism, but it seems more often than not that audiences just laugh at the image and move on. My demographic for these claims is my friends and I, but I think our experience is fairly common; We’ll spend an evening hanging out, and one person pulls up a funny picture online, and then it’s just a parade as each person tries to find a funnier picture. These times never culminate in a discussion of politics or the public image of a political leader. These times are mainly just done to share some good laughs.

When people stop taking a culture jam seriously, it is in my opinion a culture jam that has failed. And when a jam starts being used just for laughs, then is is indeed as Cammaerts says “merely another ‘noise’ amongst other noises.”