Reading – Book – Culture Jamming – Marilyn Delaure

Interesting points from the first part of the book

• I picked up this book because I am interested in the idea of cultural practice as ways to encourage people to reflect on cultural production
• Foreward:
  • Interesting point about the idea that we are living in a world where “subcultural resistance is almost instantly appropriated by corporate coolhunters” (pg. xi)
  • A lovely definition of culture jamming as “the dream of reclaiming our sense of ourselves as citizens in a culture that insists on reducing us to consumers – wallets with mouths” (pg. xv)
• Introduction:
  • Culture jamming as a contested term that has different meanings
  • Possibly shares the following characteristics:
    • it appropriates
    • it is artful
    • often playful
    • often anonymous
    • participatory
    • political
    • operates serially
    • is transgressive
  • Also talks about some of it’s limitations: treats ‘the system’ as monolithic, but this could be argued for those that talk about counterculture
  • Also that culture jamming has been captured by marketing and has lost it’s bite
  • It also can become the ends in itself – and not lead to change
• Culture jamming:
  • Idea of guerrilla semiotics: decoding and critically engaging with signs / symbols of mass culture
  • Idea that we should be restoring a “critical dimension to passive reception” (pg. 59)
• Pranking rhetoric:
  • The idea that pranking “repatterns commercial rhetoric less by protesting a disciplinary mode of power than by strategically augmenting and utilising the precious resources the contemporary media ecology affords” “one does not need to be sad to be militant” (pg. 87)
  • pranking as a method to address patterns of power rather than its contents – taking from commercial rhetoric ability to infect contemporary culture
• The faker as producer:
  • Very interesting discussion about the relative position of real and fake products and production
  • The idea that the fake needs access to the mythology of the real in order to generate it’s appeal
  • the “mythmaking fake as a productive machine in it’s own right” (pg. 107)
• Putting the jamming into culture jamming
  • case studies of music and music production as strategies to build communications, communicate messages and contribute to political change
• From culture jamming to cultural acupuncture
  • Attention based activism has it’s limits. They ask “how can we generate messages that circulate broadly but encourage deeper reflection” and “how do we deal with the seductions of the networked communication where circulation can become an end unto itself and where the medium can swap the message” (pg. 156)

Reflections

• I enjoyed the rigorous way that the text categorised and worked through different culture jamming situations and methods
• I realised that I enjoy the idea of culture jamming – and always have – because I think that my usual day to day cultural interests are tangential to mainstream culture. I do not use social media outside of messaging friends and family and enjoy media that is strange or experimental
• I want my creative practice to be part of the wider field of culture jamming, partly because I don’t actually know how to produce work that is in alignment with ‘mainstream’ thinking or approaches – my brain just does not work like that!
• The book has given me many strategies for weaving in culture jamming into my practice and I think I will take some of these ideas into my final project

Reference

DeLaure, M., Fink, M. and Dery, M. (2017). Culture Jamming. NYU Press.

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