The Art of Cultural Resistance

A pedestrian street. On the right, big department stores: neon lights and a woman’s body, her clothes announce the coming change of season. On the left, smaller shops: clothes, shoes, accessories, and the occasional café, ice cream parlour or fast food outlet. The lampposts, the walls, and even the rubbish bins have something to say. A relentless succession of images. An hysterical and constantly changing sound track accompanying the murmur of the multitude. Not far off, a camera immortalises the moment – for your protection. I am only passing through, but just in case, and because I am worth it, I buy myself a lipstick.

I could be in any city in the Western World, and I feel at home. I share the codes. I know the rules. This is my culture. The radio, the television, the newspapers and the street endlessly repeat the same messages. In this empire of signs, not listening is not an option. Are there any free spaces left? Yes. There is the freedom to read the messages in a different way, to change their meaning. What is left is culture jamming.

Cultural Sabotage

First coined to describe interference in radio frequencies, the expression culture jamming, or cultural sabotage, is now used to describe any form of guerrilla communication that confuses and/or distorts the message transmitted by the mass media. The central idea is that mass media and advertising have taken popular culture to remould it and give it back to society as packaging for one central idea: the answer is to consume.

This instigation to consume is more than a mere company strategy to increase profits. Advertising is not just an intermediary between supply and demand. As the publicist Bernard Cathelat states in his book Publicité et Societé:
“Advertising is not only a commercial word, but also a political word, a social word, a moral word and an ideological discourse. It is the dominant language of the culture, and without doubt, the most important information system in history.”

Little by little, the “citizen” has given way to the “consumer”. For half of humanity, free time revolves around consumption, and the commercial media and leisure spaces offer environments carefully designed to isolate and exclude any element that might interfere with the impulse to consume. Among these isolated and excluded elements are, of course, real problems, conflict, and “politics” in the widest sense of the term.

As private space and private lives play an increasingly important role in globalised societies, collective spaces, political discourses and alternatives are being relegated and marginalised: they’re uncool, they’re not “in”. Even worse, the de-ideologising ideology of advertising and consumption does not only create a manifestation of constructed desires that has no parallel in human history; it also creates a fictitious spectacle and presents it as a reflection of reality. By constantly playing with this confusion between perception and reality, it eventually distances the optic nerve from the object. Advertising changes the way we look at things. It changes the way we see and relate to the world around us, and in doing this it does away with the possibility for creating and experiencing a tangible common world - the very basis of collective life and political experience.

The conscious act of seeing has given way to automatically absorbing the thousands of images and millions of messages we receive daily. It is this saturation of our environment (television, radio, buses, underground stations, rubbish bins, post boxes, building fronts, clothing) which depoliticises our daily experience, and which is the target of cultural sabotage. Cultural sabotage introduces itself into the intrusion, inserting subversive meanings into the constructed semiotic universe.

In this sense, cultural sabotage is nothing new. In the long list of media subversion and interference pioneers we could include the samizdat, publishing clandestine literature in post-Stalinist Russia; John Heartfield’s anti-fascist photomontages; the situationist détournement which denounced the “society of the spectacle”; the clandestine journalism of the 1960s; the Who’s classic album The Who Sell Out, in which fake adverts appear on the cover and between the songs; pseudo-religious satire like the Church of the SubGenius (and, in a more recent version, the Reverend Billy); the creation of empty icons such as Andre the Giant; Ant Farm’s performances using cultural artefacts such as cars and televisions; the discontent of proletarianised office workers in the 1980s, that gave rise to initiatives like the magazine Processed World; and the early examples of subcultural bricolage, which appropriated and used symbols associated with the dominant culture.

Subvertising

Cultural sabotage covers a multitude of expressions and dissident and subcultural forms. In its widest definition, any act that distorts the blast wave of mainstream culture is culture jamming: from a street performance to the interruption of television transmissions, including the creation of alternative culture and academic hacking from outside university walls. Nevertheless, the most widely practiced form of cultural sabotage is, without doubt, subvertising.

Coming from a fusion of the words subversion and advertising, subvertising, or counter-publicity, is defined on www.subvertise.org as “the graffiti on the wall, the sticker on the lamppost, the altered slogan on the billboard, the spoof T-shirt… The key is in redefining and reclaiming our surroundings, snatching them back from the hands of big business.”

According to Adbusters, a good subvert should “imitate the image and meaning of the target advert, generating the classic ‘delayed reaction’ as the viewer realises they have been tricked. Subverts create a cognitive dissonance. They pierce the hype and ostentation of our mediated reality and, for a moment, reveal a more profound truth.”

Many acts of subvertising do no more than try to cause a momentary blink, which might lead to a questioning of consumerist society. By manipulating logos, slogans and brand images, they try to challenge received ideas of what’s cool, what’s trendy, what’s in, and what we should all desire and consider desirable. For example, the implicit idea that to be able to choose from a limited range of more or less necessary products is synonymous with freedom.

Graphic dissidence in the digital age

Thanks to the massive diffusion of information and communications technology, it is becoming easier and easier both to manipulate the images that set the scene for consumer society, and to publicise the results. The tools available to us now are a far cry not only from the poster making of the Russian Revolution and the Spanish Civil War, but also from the use of graphic dissidence in the 1960s and 70s by anti-HIV/AIDS activists, the ecologist movement and others.

Without a doubt, digital innovations have brought about changes in traditional dissident methods of organising. In part this is thanks to the appearance of multiple media that can be adapted to the specific needs of each cause or mobilisation. Web formats work for rapid mobilisation of activists at an international level, or when faced with limited resources. Paper and ink can be used in difficult times, such as during armed conflicts, or when working with populations still excluded from the digital era.

Public Space

It is difficult to put a value on the importance of cyberspace as “public” space, and, as a result, it is difficult to evaluate the impact of graphic dissidence that limits itself to modifying or creating images. However, cultural sabotage sometimes displays its alternative messages in a less equivocal arena of contemporary society: the common space.

Advertising has multiplied in recent years, invading streets, plazas and outdoor spaces with consumer messages. Without any questioning or discussion, the elements of our urban environment, public transport and buildings became advertising media. What were once spaces to meet and interact, spaces for exchange, spaces for diversity and integration – in short, political spaces – are now just locations to place images and slogans that relate to the individual not as a citizen or as a person, but as a consumer and a commercial target.

Thus, in exchange for the stipulated price, public space, which was for everyone, becomes private space. Just as happened with social services, pensions and health care, the limits of the “privatisable” extend yet further to take in this last tiny bastion of “society”, and final vestige of “collectivity”. Once the television set has managed to relay mainstream ideology into every living room, the elimination of this final frontier completes consumer society’s takeover.

Yet the walls will not fall silent: through the massive use of stencils, stickers, graffiti; through the painted moustache and the speech bubble; through liberating billboards, altering the landscape, détournement, and the manipulation of our urban environment etc.; dissidence blurs the idyllic image of social consensus.

Cultural sabotage as social critique

It is in social criticism that dissident creativity finds its major source of inspiration and space for action. In this sense, it is revealing, that one of the events that has made most walls speak and provoked most unexpected interferences into the discourse of normality is a clearly political event: the war on Iraq.

In the same way, the current peak in cultural resistance cannot be separated from the increasing activity of new social movements, from the events of Seattle to the emergence of the misnamed “anti-globalisation movement”. For example, the biggest action by the French antipub (anti-advertising) movement, which altered, broke, subverted and graffitied a Paris overrun by advertising, took place in November 2003, to coincide with the European Social Forum being held in the city.

Although many counter-publicity actions are openly and clearly political acts, it is clear that not every act of cultural sabotage is a political expression, nor do they all reflect support for an alternative social model. Nevertheless, any intervention into mainstream discourse opens a door to imagining other possible worlds. As you will see in this first edition of Malababa, in Banksy’s clear skies on the Palestinian wall, the socialised abundance of Yomango, the commercial models freed from their silence by the Bubble Project’s speech bubbles, the Yes Men’s direct interventions into the mainstream, etc. etc.; these actions reclaim our ways of seeing, and smiling, and hoping. They are the wink of complicity that takes us out of life’s supermarket and opens a green door in the prison of our impotence.

Translated by Kate Wilson