Christine Harold--"Pranking Rhetoric: 'Culture Jamming' as Media Activism

Christine Harold (2004) Pranking rhetoric: “culture jamming” as media activism, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 21:3, 189-211, DOI: 10.1080/0739318042000212693

This essay explores the practice of “culture jamming” as a strategy of rhetorical protest. Specifically, “pranksters” deploy the tools of the mass media and marketing in order to take advantage of the resources and venues they afford. Through the concept of “pranking,” this essay suggests that the most promising forms of media activism may resist less through negation and opposition than by playfully appropriating commercial rhetoric both by folding it over on itself and exaggerating its tropes. 

 
 The article begins by highlighting a recent adbusters campaign aimed at mocking the Nike swoosh with a black dot. 

They're utilizing culture jamming, which "seeks to undermine the marketing rhetoric of multinational corporations, specifically through such practices as media hoaxing, corporate sabotage, billboard 'liberation,' and trademark infringement" (190).

"subvertizers" seek to undo marketing strategies.

Essentially, they use advertisement parodies to "culture jam."

"I suggest that while the advertising sabotage articulated by Adbusters is not without some rhetorical value, it does little to address the rhetoric of contemporary marketing—a mode of power that is quite happy to oblige subversive rhetoric and shocking imagery" (191). Marketers now actively try to sabotage age-old advertising tropes as a way to distance themselves from "dominant motifs."


"Further, I want to suggest that despite its deconstructive sensibility, parody, an example of what Mikhail Bakhtin (1984) would describe as turning the world upside down, perpetuates a commitment to rhetorical binaries—the hierarchical form it supposedly wants to upset" (191).

"Hence parody, as negative critique, is not up to the task of undermining the parodist’s own purchase on the Truth as it maintains both a hierarchy of language and the protestor’s role as revealer. Parody derides the content of what it sees as oppressive rhetoric, but fails to attend to its patterns" (191).



 

 
The essay then shifts to focus on pranksters, who "resists less through negating and opposing dominant rhetorics than by playfully and provocatively folding existing cultural forms in on themselves...in an effort to redirect the resources of commercial media toward new ends" (191).

"I conclude by suggesting that although pranking strategies do perform the Aristotelian notion of exploiting available means, for them to be fully imagined as rhetoric, rhetoric itself may have to be somewhat recalibrated in its role as a mass-mediated political art" (191-92).

Pranking shouldn't replace more traditional forms of protest rhetoric, but they should be seen as a viable option.

Jamming "usually implies an interruption, a sabotage, hoax, prank, banditry, or blockage of what are seen as the monolithic power structures governing cultural life" (192).

"it may be more useful to consider jamming as an artful proliferation of messages, a rhetorical process of intervention and invention, which challenges the ability of corporate discourses to make meaning in predictable ways" (192).

Considering parody as jamming, Harold writes: "This insistence on revealing a hidden truth also becomes a problem for other reasons. Such an insistence disallows a forceful response to what it faces because it can only react. It is a rhetoric that resentfully tells its audience “Things are not as they should be” without affirming possible alternatives" (192).

"Second, then, because the no-sayer has not challenged the essential form of the binary, one can never negate adequately by its own, dialectical standards. A rhetoric that is defined by negation must always encounter more boundaries that must be overcome. More transgression is always required, which inevitably produces more cynicism and resentment. Certainly, saying no is sometimes a crucial political strategy. However, I suggest that asceticism may not be an effective intervention into the scintillating world of consumer culture; and ironically, by ardently pursuing the authentic realm “out there,” one plays one’s role as consumer in the fullest possible sense, endlessly chasing after something just beyond reach" (192).

"That is, people are not denied access to information and knowledges but are granted ever greater access to them through the opening up of technologies and the hybridization of institutions. However, what might appear as new freedoms

also enable business to increasingly modulate every aspect of life. I suggest that the proliferation of the rhetoric of consumerism, in part, marks this shift from discipline to control. Because of this emerging shift from disciplinarity (which spotlights the political rhetoric of the nation-state) to control (which increasingly relies on the visual rhetoric of the market), the opportunities for political protest have shifted as well" (193-94). Essentially, Harold looks to Foucault's and Deleuze's archaeology of capitalistic transformation, which states that we've undergone a move to a consumer-service driven economy full of technology, effectually changing the nature and means of protest rhetoric.

"Media pranksters, an increasingly active type of consumer activist, prefer affirmation and appropriation to opposition and sabotage. Whereas the culture jammer as saboteur opposes commercialism through revelatory rhetoric such as parody, pranksters can be seen as comedians, as playful explorers of the commercial media landscape" (194).

"To reveal, one must stand in a familiar place and know just what is behind the spectacular curtain. In contrast, the comedian is something of a surfer with no firm, knowable ground on which to stand. Rather, she learns to navigate a force that is already in motion and will continue to be in motion long after she has passed" (194).

"Prank, in this sense, is an augmentation of dominant modes of communication that interrupts their conventional patterns. In the second alternative sense, a prank is a wrinkle, or a fold. Like a fold, a prank can render a qualitative change by turning and doubling a material or text. This qualitative change is produced not through the addition of novelty, but through reconfiguration of the object itself" (196).

 

"As we have seen, in its monkey-wrenching version, sabotage implies destruction or the stopping and hindering of flows through the introduction of an outside element. Put simply, it is a clogging. However, in the word’s second sense, as a launching tube, sabotage also implies a channeling, or a transmission of energy or resources through a conduit. This implies that resistance can also enable and direct energy flows rather than merely thwart them...sabotage is not a chaotic, shapeless, anarchic practice, but one that is restrained and shaped by the machinery from which it emerges; without the transmitting carrier, no thrust. In other words, constraints can be seen as immanent to those flows that seek to transform them" (197).

The "jamming" in this piece refers more to musical like jamming than it does to sabotage. Of course, the two connotation work well, but Harold seems more interested in appropriating a medium and inscribing over that canvas. 

Harold highlights a famous Barbie and G.I.Joe hack, wherein the pranksters bought the two talking dolls and switched their voices. Therefore, when children received the dolls for Xmas, the GI Joe spoke like Barbie and Barbie spoke like GI Joe, replete with hypernormalized gender roles. The group also included directions for parents to call local news media as well as instructions online about how others could perform the hack. The group behind the prank assumes and appropriates the corporate model of protection for the hackers.

As a private corporation, the group enables activists and investors to participate in illegal product tampering without much personal risk. As the group describes its mission: “ark is indeed just a corporation, and it benefits from corporate protections, but unlike other corporations, its ‘bottom line’ is to improve culture, rather than its own pocketbook; it seeks cultural profit, not financial” 

Concerning the Biotic Baking Brigade: 

"A pie in the face of Milton Friedman becomes what rhetoricians would call a synechdoche; it is an easy visual short hand for a whole host of grievances against globalization’s prevailing economic ideology.
The BBB’s Rahula Janowski explains the logic behind the group’s choice of “weapon”: “Pie is an example that you don’t have to revere someone just because they’re more powerful than you ... Pie is the great equalizer. How wealthy and powerful are you with pie dripping off your face?” Janowski points out that many CEOs and other powerful people do not often put themselves in situations where they hear dissent" (201).

"Unlike Adbusters, the BBB does not remain resentfully on the outside, denied access to what DeLuca and Peeples (2002) call the “public screen” by the commercial media. Instead, they hijack events that are already orchestrated for television—public speeches, rallies, meet-and-greets, and so on. They know that the image of a famous politician or captain of industry getting a pie in the face is so striking, the image-hungry media cannot help but cover it" (201).

"The BBB, then, mobilizes two familiar but dissonant visuals—a sober public speaker and a pie in the face—and by joining them, produces a kind of political jujitsu, using the power of the broadcast media toward its own ends" (202).

"Media pranksters like those in the BLO or the BBB just borrow that strategy, turning the media’s love of images over on itself, creating a venue for issues that the commercial media often ignore. Further, BBB agents, despite their somewhat militant politics, are always clean cut, articulate, and wear a sly smile. Hence, they are not easily dismissed as militant hippie radicals creating anarchy" (202).

"Anticipating terminology popular with contempor- ary culture jammers, he described the practice as “guerrilla media” warfare (p. 214). In this spirit, the Truth campaign, in effect, trains young people to practice their own brand of Situationism, by confiscating a small space from commercial advertising and using it as a site for rhetorical invention. The goal to reclaim public space from the increasing “contamination” of commercial messages is shared by many culture jammers—billboard liberators, graffiti artists, and hackers, for example—but these practices usually require a criminal act, defacing private property. The Truth bubble strategy is no different in that it is, in effect, encouraging young people to vandalize a corporation’s property. But, unlike other culture jammers who readily embrace their role as cultural guerrillas, Truth’s suggested hijack is noteworthy in that it comes from a government-regulated organization working with legally granted tobacco money" (206).

"The title of this essay, “pranking rhetoric,” was carefully chosen. On one hand, it names a category of rhetorical action: pranking. On the other, it articulates an underlying premise of this analysis. That is, in order to consider pranking as rhetoric, rhetoric itself must be, well, pranked. And, here, I mean prank in all its forms: to trick, but also to fold, and to adorn."

"As I have suggested, they do not necessarily rely on that “aha!” moment when an audience becomes conscious of some new insight. Also, their effectiveness does not depend on the ethos or charisma of a specific rhetor. Hence, they fall outside the expectations of what conventionally qualifies as effective rhetoric"

"In general, pranking has the potential to unravel rhetoric’s continued reliance on individual auteurs (be they presidents or protestors) because a prank’s source is often impossible to locate and, ultimately, irrelevant to its political impacts" (207).

"Contemporary commercial culture depends upon consumers having somewhat routinized responses to words and images; however, these re- sponses need not be completely homogenous. Indeed, it is the protean, polysemic nature of brands that allows them to be disseminated globally, across individuals and cultures (208).

"Pranking—as intensification, augmentation, folding—is conceptually and practi- cally quite different from how we often consider rhetorics of protest. Pranking is often comedic, but not in a satirical, derisive sense that prescribes a “correct” political position. It takes the logic of branding seriously" (208).

"It is important to note that the opportunities offered by culture jamming should not be seen as supplanting other, more traditional modes of engagement that continue to produce powerful rhetorical and political effects. Culture jamming— largely a response to consumerism and corporate power—may not be as productive in rhetorical situations that call for legal or policy interventions, for example. Further, culture jamming may be an effective strategy for engaging corporations who rely heavily on positive public relations, but may do little in the face of those which benefit from working beneath the public’s radar. For these reasons, it may be most helpful to take seriously culture jamming, and pranking in particular, as important components of rhetorical hybrids, collections of tools that activists and scholars can utilize when intervening in the complex world of commercial discourse" (209).