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I have often had cause to reflect on the degree to which critical social and cultural theory
has fixated on advertisements. This is not say that the efforts of scholars such as Erving
Goffman, Judith Williamson, or Stuart Ewen have somehow been in vain; nothing could
be further from the truth. Rather, as someone who came to grad school as a refugee from
advertising, I continue to puzzle over the cumulative investment we have clearly made in
dissecting texts, as a perennial substitute for a more broadly conceived mode of analysis
that might, for example, include the subjective aspects of commercial cultural production
(as well as incorporating the strengths of other approaches such as political economy).
After all, the sociology of news is a long-established concern; if journalism, then why not
advertising? I suspect our overarching reliance on rooting out ideological matters
specifically tied to the text may also have something to do with the distaste that is often
expressed for this, the second oldest profession.
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Adbusters: The Journal of the Mental Environment is perhaps best known for the fun it
has made of textual tinkering. Its tiny staff and various contributors have, over most of the
last decade, made political capital out of undermining lavish advertising campaigns for
clothes, cars, and fast food. Their favorite tactic has been the publication of ad parodies --
or "subvertisements" -- that identify the central conceit of such campaigns and then
articulate them to more pressing social concerns. Alcohol and its side effects are brought
together under a headline that reads "Absolute Impotence"; below this, the familiar bottle
droops listlessly in a small puddle of spilled vodka. Cigarettes and cancer come together in
a 'subvert' that features a defeated-looking "Joe Chemo"; he slumps in a hospital bed
clutching his sunglasses, one arm hooked up to an intravenous drip. Such textual japes
have often found their way out of the magazine onto fridge doors and into media and
cultural studies lecture halls.
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Adbusters journal has recently been joined by a Website (www.adbusters.org, also at
www.culturejammers.org) that includes much of the quarterly magazine's content, and
shares all of its visual panache. Cyclical features include seasonal campaigns such as Buy
Nothing Day and TV Turnoff Week. The results of a recent Creative Resistance Contest
received over 300 submissions, each one designed to "change the way people think and
act". The ad parodies,
however, have become singularly oblique: apparently it is now enough to reproduce
original ads in their entirety. A recent back cover of the magazine simply sported a huge
pack of Kamel Reds; it was left to the most observant viewers to notice the miniscule line
of text at the bottom that read "Designers … stay away from corporations that want you to
lie for them - Tibor Kalman". Given their apparent faith in the contemporary transparency
of the text's most insidious ideological deceits, then, the Adbusters team has begun to
focus its attention on the cultural intermediaries. For me, this should be a welcome move.
Indeed, as a designer, I can say that wandering through the magazine and the Website is a
highly pleasurable pursuit. However, they also seem to be rapidly painting themselves into
a corner. The focus of the most recent issue was a deconstruction of the medium itself: the
Website's front door simply carried the word "Website", respectively, in bold yellow
letters against a blue background. While the theme was effectively carried through
editorially, one worries about where their collective vision can possibly lead them next.
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Kalle Lasn, the editor, and his talented art director Chris Dixon, appear to have committed
themselves wholeheartedly to reaching out to disaffected graphic designers and ad
creatives, whom Lasn likes to think of as a kind of revolutionary avant-garde of what he
calls "culture jamming": "our aim is to topple existing power structures and forge a major
shift in the way we will live in the 21st century... . Above all, [culture jamming] will change
the way we interact with the mass media and the way meaning is produced in society".
(Sound vaguely familiar?) As it happens, Lasn and Dixon are increasingly invested in the
political deployment of graphic design conventions that flatter, rather than mock, the
aesthetic sensibilities of contemporary culture at its most urban and knowing. It is perhaps
unsurprising, then, that a favorite topic of recent photo-essays has been the soullessness of
suburbia -- a damning indictment of the lives of the majority of North Americans, whose
existence is apparently the most corrupted by consumption; they appear as two-dimensional, terminally unhip characters in a Hellish landscape of dreary subdivisions.
While we are perhaps invited to view them as the most telling effect of our consumer
culture, I wonder if such images also provide comfort for young, hip urbanites who can
shudder cosily at the tastelessness of it all -- and thereby remind themselves that "this is not
us". In this sense, Adbusters' political agenda of anti-consumerism is in danger of
becoming an exercise in differentiation and distinction based precisely on the kind of
cultural and economic capital they apparently abhore.
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A watershed for Adbusters was the publication, last year, of the First Things First
Manifesto 2000, a call for social responsibility among designers that basically frames
advertising as the enemy. It begins: "we ... have been raised in a world in which the
techniques and apparatus of advertising have persistently been presented to us as the most
lucrative, effective and desirable use of our talents". Signed by thirty-three well-known
"graphic designers, art directors and visual communicators", the Manifesto is an update of
an earlier call-to-arms hatched in London in the 1960s. Adbusters was instrumental in
reviving and redrafting the Manifesto, along with Rick Poynor, a British educator and
writer on design, who also provided an informative essay that provides some historical
contextualisation. First Things First 2000 eventually appeared in at least seven design and
architecture magazines in Europe and North America, and has achieved its aim of
provoking debate -- albeit commonly dismissive or defensive. Importantly, when it
appeared in Adbusters, it was presented as a "design manifesto", which underlines the
investment Lasn, in particular, has in addressing himself to a putative audience of disaffected
cultural intermediaries (Bourdieu; Featherstone). The Manifesto
is a cornerstone of the current Website; it
includes the original version, an ongoing list of responses (some affirmative, others
critical), and, most recently, a simple mechanism to allow interested surfers to immediately
add their names in support. This list had grown
to about 630 names by the end of March 2000.
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On closer inspection, however, it turns out that the emancipatory politics of culture
jamming come at a high price for those who might already identify themselves as invested
and informed in such matters. In his new book Culture Jam: the Uncooling Of America,
Lasn declares that "we are not feminists"; "we are not lefties"; and, "we are not
academics". The glaring problems with this sort of tactic lead Edward Herman, co-author
with Noam Chomsky of Manufacturing Consent, to write in complaining that
"Lasn's effort to make culture jamming into a general philosophy and program of
activism ... is intellectually and programmatically pitiful" (Herman 12). Lasn's
response, in the same issue of Adbusters, was intemperate at best: "once again, a
traditional lefty describes as 'action' such efforts as 'thinking very hard' and writing
proposals that others, presumably, are expected to carry forward. But what have you done
lately besides talk and write, Mr. Herman?" (Lasn 12). Once again, progressive
politics threatens to eat itself.
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While Lasn rejects out of hand such familiar initiatives as the campus-based Public Interest
Research Groups and Project Censored, not to mention "tenured professors, TV pundits and
self-proclaimed champions of oppositional culture" (119), he also suggests that
"the liberal Left ... has hung its flag on the black movement, the women's movement and
the environmental movement. It has muscled in on every major struggle and social protest
of the past half century" (ibid.). Of course this begs the question: according to Lasn's
taxonomy, who exactly constitutes the Left? Are there no black or female "Lefties"? Are
tenured professors universally apathetic or out-of-touch? In this light, the cool of the
Adbusters Website begins to seem rather less compelling. If Lasn has developed a distaste
for a supposed rapprochement of the "Left" and the politics of identity, how can he then
promote a critical activism that, in everything but name, is invested in both progressive
politics and the targetting of designers as the new political avant-garde? To give him credit,
if Lasn has found a way to address critically our contemporary cultural landscape without
reverting to the kind of flaccid populism and celebratory relativism that characterises the
worst of Cultural Studies, then we may have the kernel of a useful weapon in fighting
corporate abuses of power and the ubiquity of commercial culture. But to trample all that
has gone before in order to make his point seems pointless indeed.
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To be sure, the cultural intermediaries (whom Callinicos describes as the "Children
of Marx and Coca-Cola") have historically shown themselves to be an ambivalent bunch,
largely invested in plying, developing, and showing off their craft and their wit for all comers, irrespective of purpose or consequence. If there is more fun to be had cooking up
trouble for contemporary capitalism than in promoting it, then they may be an enormously
useful resource for positive social change. The only obstacle would then be the paltry
monetary rewards for biting the hand that feeds them. Finally, I should admit that my name
is among those added to the Manifesto at the Adbusters Website. As a seeming testament
to the perversity of the Web -- and in defiance of its apparent impermanence -- there is no
apparent way for me to remove my name from the list. But then I'm torn: as a graphic
designer and a former advertising art director, I certainly want to keep it there; as a
scholar of contemporary cultural politics, I've become much less sure.
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References
Bourdieu, P. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Trans. R. Nice. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984.
Callinicos, A. Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique. Cambridge: Polity, 1989.
Featherstone, M. Consumer Culture and Postmodernism. London: Sage, 1991.
Herman, E., and N. Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of
the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon, 1988.
Herman, E. The New Activism. Letter to the Editor. Adbusters 27 (Autumn 1999): 12.
Lasn, K. Editorial. Adbusters 27 (Autumn 1999): 12.
Lasn, K. Culture Jam: The Uncooling of America. New York: Eagle
Brook/William Morrow, 1999.
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Citation
reference for this article
MLA style:
Matt Soar. "The Politics of Culture Jamming: Adbusters on the Web and in Print" M/C Reviews 12 Apr. 2000. [your
date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/features/politics/jamming.html>.
Chicago style:
Matt Soar, "The Politics of Culture Jamming: Adbusters on the Web and in Print," M/C Reviews 12 Apr. 2000, <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/features/politics/jamming.html>
([your date of access]).
APA style:
Matt Soar. (2000) The politics of culture jamming: Adbusters on the Web and in print. M/C Reviews 12 Apr. 2000.
<http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/reviews/features/politics/jamming.html>
([your date of access]).
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