Culture jamming

Urban living involves a daily onslaught of advertisements, corporate art, and mass-mediated popular culture (see: THEORY: Society of the spectacle). As oppressive and alienating as this spectacle may be, its very ubiquity offers plentiful opportunities for semiotic jiu-jitsu and creative disruption. Subversive and marginalized ideas can spread contagiously by reappropriating artifacts drawn from popular media and injecting them with radical connotations.

This technique is commonly known as culture jamming. It originates in the practice of détournement, popularized by Guy Debord and the French Situationists. Détournement (which roughly translates to “overturning” or “derailment”) appropriates and alters an existing media artifact, one that the intended audience is already familiar with, in order to give it a new, subversive meaning.

A carefully planned culture jam bypasses the audience’s mental filters by mimicking familiar cultural symbols, then disrupting them.

In many cases, the intent is to criticize the appropriated artifact. For instance, the neo-Situationist magazine Adbusters has created American flags bearing corporate logos in place of stars. The traditional flag, which is often used to quash dissent by equating America with liberty and progress (see: THEORY: Floating signifier), is made to communicate its own critique: Corporations, not the people, rule America. Similarly, an Adbusters “subvertisement” for Camel cigarettes, perfectly rendered in the style and lettering of real Camel advertisements, depicts a bald Joe Chemo in a hospital bed.

Culture jamming works because humans are creatures of habit who think in images, feel our way through life, and often rely on familiarity and comfort as the final arbiters of truth (see: PRINCIPLE: Think narratively). Rational arguments and earnest appeals to morality may prove less effective than a carefully planned culture jam that bypasses the audience’s mental filters by mimicking familiar cultural symbols, then disrupting them.

For instance, University of California, Davis police officer Lt. John Pike began to pop up in some unexpected places after he was captured on film casually pepper spraying students during a peaceful protest. One image depicted Lt. Pike walking through John Trumbull’s classic painting The Declaration of Independence and pepper spraying America’s founding document, while another depicted him in Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, pepper spraying a woman lounging in the grass. These images, and other culture jams of “pepper spray cop,” are some of the most visible critiques of police brutality (at least against white people) in recent American history.

In addition to its instrumental, critical function, culture jamming has an important humanistic function. Culture jamming can be used to disrupt the flow of the media spectacle and, ultimately, to rob it of its power. Advertisements start to feel less like battering rams of consumerism and more like the raw materials for art and critical reflection. Advertising firms may still generate much of culture’s raw content, but through culture jamming tactics, we can reclaim a bit of autonomy from the mass-mediated hall of mirrors that we live in, and find artful ways to talk back to the spectacle and use its artifacts to amplify our own voices.

Originally published in Beautiful Trouble.