Discussion Post

Jamming the Political: Beyond Counter-hegemonic Practices Bart Cammaerts

Introduction

Cultural jamming was introduced in popular discourse by the ‘audio-Dadaism’ band

Negativeland on a cassette recording called JamCon84 released in 1985 and reissued on CD in 1994. On the tape one of the band members referred to so-called Billboard

activists—altering billboards with subversive meanings—as the archetypical cultural jammer:

As awareness of how the media environment we occupy affects and directs our inner life grows, some resist. The skilfully reworked billboard [ . . . ] directs the public viewer to a consideration of the original corporate strategy. The studio for the cultural jammer is the world at large. (Negativeland, 1985/1994)

To ‘sample’ Berry (1995), jammers ‘create with mirrors’. Besides this, jamming is very

much about what Gramsci (1971, p. 417) called a ‘new way of conceiving the world’ and ‘modifying [ . . . ] popular thought and mummified popular culture’. In doing so,

he referred to the construction of a counter-hegemony as a strategy to challenge dominant forces and discourses in society. By placing resistance, the war of position,

within the realm of (mass) popular culture, Gramsci also refers to the need to translate these counter-hegemonic discourses beyond the like-minded intellectuals.

Lasn (2000, p. xvi), one of the co-founders of Adbusters, describes cultural jamming

as ‘a rebranding strategy—a social demarketing campaign’. Jordan (2002, p. 102; emphasis added), taking a more academic stance, defines cultural jamming as ‘an

attempt to reverse and transgress the meaning of cultural codes whose primary aim is to

ISSN 1030-4312 (print)/ISSN 1469-3666 (online)/07/010071-20 q 2007 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/10304310601103992

Bart Cammaerts is a political scientist and media researcher lecturing in communication and politics in the Media

& Communication Department of the London School of Economics & Political Science (LSE), UK. He also chairs

the communication and democracy section of the European Communication Research and Education

Association (ECREA). Correspondence to: Bart Cammaerts, Media and Communication Department, London

School of Economics & Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK. E-mail:

[email protected]

Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies

Vol. 21, No. 1, March 2007, pp. 71–90

persuade us to buy something or be someone’. According to Dery (1993; emphasis added) the cultural jammer is he or she ‘who intrude(s) on the intruders, investing ads,

newscasts, and other media artefacts with subversive meanings’. Furthermore, in her book No Logo Klein (2000, p. 281; emphasis added) refers to the cultural jam as

‘interceptions—counter-messages that hack into a corporation’s own method of communication to send a message starkly at odds with the one that was intended’.

Klein’s use of the term hacking also implicitly refers to hacktivism, another notion that has become very commonplace in recent years to coin digital activism (Jordan &

Taylor, 2003). One of the classic examples of a cultural jam is an album by Negativeland called U2,

with a U2-spy plane on the cover. By reversing the pop-brand U2 and relating to its

original meaning, as well as using a sample of U2, Negativeland deliberately confused the audience and challenged stringent copyright regulations. They were sued by the

management of the rock band U2 and as a consequence went bankrupt (Negativeland, 1995). Another much-cited example of a cultural jam is the well-documented Peretti v.

Nike case (Peretti, 2001; Carty, 2001). Jonah Peretti, at that time an MA student at MIT, took advantage of a stunt that Nike launched allowing customers to order

custom-made shoes by adding a word or slogan that would be printed on the shoe. Peretti chose the word ‘sweatshop’ to be printed on his shoes, which was, of course, rejected by Nike. What made this a classic jam, however, was the fact that Peretti

posted his correspondence with Nike on the Internet, which in no time was forwarded and distributed throughout the world, thereby embarrassing Nike. Also, more

mainstream civil society organizations, such as Greenpeace, increasingly use cultural jamming techniques in their campaigns against corporations. A good example is the

‘Stop E$$O’-campaign, where they substituted the double S with US dollar signs. Esso/Exxon/Mobile then decided to sue Greenpeace for infringing the copyright of its

logo and for reputational damage. In reaction to the court case, which was won by Greenpeace, it launched a call to the general public to subvert the Esso logo in

graphical jams (Greenpeace, 2002). The results were often cunning and witty fake logos.1

Although cultural jamming is inherently ‘political’ in that it reacts against the

dominance of commodification and corporate actors within society and everyday life, the way it has been articulated up until now has focused more on attacking and

mocking the capitalist corporate brand culture than the realm of politics. This article will not focus as such on cultural jamming as a counter-technique to the dominant

consumer brand-oriented culture, but rather on the use of cultural jamming techniques by political actors, as well as by citizens, in their political communication

within fragmented counter-public spheres, as well as in the mainstream public sphere. As such, jamming the political should also be seen as a way of dealing with the messiness of reality, as subverting meanings, and thereby using humour, mocking,

satire and parody. This is not a totally new phenomenon (Hutcheon, 1994; Dentith, 2000). Besides the history of (political) parody, jamming can also be traced back to

several artistic and subcultural movements from the beginning of the twentieth

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century through to the 1980s. However, in recent years a new wave of subversive expressions has been observed diversifying in terms of content as well as distribution

channels—of which the Internet is an important one.

Fragmented Public Spheres in the Rhizome

In some ways this ‘bossa nova’ of subverting expressions illustrates the fact that the

media have evolved even more into a heavily contested battlefield for meanings to make sense of the world, as well as for competing ideas of what citizenship—from a

national, but also increasingly also from a regional or global perspective—entails. From this perspective the image of a unified rational and consensual Habermasian

public sphere is difficult to sustain (Dahlgren, 2005, p. 152). As stated above, the idea of cultural and political jamming is often linked to challenging dominant discourses and developing counter-hegemonic discourses. As such, the image of public

‘sphericules’ interacting and competing with the dominant public sphere, as introduced by Gitlin (1998), is much more helpful to understand and frame

cultural/political jamming from a public sphere perspective. However, contrary to what Gitlin and other authors, such as Putnam (2000) and

Galston (2003), conclude, this differentiation and fragmentation is not to the detriment of democracy per se. This opposite view concurs with the notion of

agonistic plurality, as coined, amongst others, by Mouffe (1999). She claims that such an approach takes into account the ‘multiplicity of voices that a pluralist society

encompasses’ as well as ‘the complexity of the power structure that this network of differences implies’ (Mouffe, 1999, p. 757). The argument is that, instead of threatening democracy, a plurality of oppositional discourses and social organization

is central to current notions of political mobilization and participation. According to Mouffe, within a democratic culture, which in itself needs to be hegemonic, passions

and fierce disagreements should not be eliminated but actively mobilized. From this perspective the idea of both competing and interacting public spaces2 sounds more in

tune with current expressions of alternative communication propelled by the Internet as well as radio, and can also be linked to what Fraser (1992) calls the ‘subaltern

counter-publics’. From a more deliberative perspective, Downey and Fenton (2003, p. 193) refer to the difference between autonomous public spheres and counter-public spheres, whereby the latter are seen as challenging ‘the dominant public sphere rather

then simply be[ing] independent from it’. Besides this, anti-public spheres can also be identified, placing themselves at the political extremes. Such extremes explicitly

challenge or question basic democratic values and are therefore described as anti- public spheres.

In Figure. 1 a normative (democratic) model is presented that tries to capture this complex interplay of competing and fragmented public spheres, some striving to

‘hack’ into the mainstream public sphere, controlled largely by market and state, others not. A distinction is also made between a democratic civil society on the one

hand and a much darker undemocratic side of civil society, such as neo-Nazi or

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fundamentalist movements, on the other. This model distinguishes different public spheres, some inter-relating with each other, some challenging the dominant spheres, others remaining independent. In this regard, the model also accounts for the dynamic

nature, interaction and networking between different (transnationalized) public spheres. Furthermore, the model acknowledges the existance of anti-public spheres,

going against the basic values of democratic culture and which are often forgotten in analyses and accounts of counter-hegemonic communication.

This model is useful in understanding jamming, as jams are present in all the different kinds of sphericules, be it transgressing into the dominant public sphere,

within autonomous spheres or anti-public spheres. The normativity of this model lies in the fact that in many Western democracies anti-democratic forces, such as for

example neo-fascist parties, manoeuvre themselves centre stage of the dominant public sphere through the strategic use of the formal rules of representative democracy and through perverting freedom of speech rights to incite hatred, racism and

intolerance. It is important in this regard not to squander the legacy and democratic values of Habermasian rationalist argument. Respect for other persuasions, mutual

tolerance towards difference and what Dahlgren (2005, p. 153) calls ‘the integrative societal function of the public sphere’ remain useful normative values and important

in avoiding a slide into intolerance and outright violence between communities, religions and ethnicities.

Because the cultural and political phenomenon of jamming is present at so many different levels and moves in so many different directions, it remains difficult to get to grips with it within a consistent theoretical model. However, a rhizomatic approach—

as developed by Carpentier et al., (2003) in terms of community media, thereby referring to Deleuze and Guattari’s metaphor of the rhizome—is helpful in

this regard. The rhizome ‘connects any point to any point’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 19) and is conceptualized as a dynamic, non-linear, nomadic, anarchistic and thus

Figure 1 Interacting Public Spaces

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non-hierarchical network. In this regard the cultural/political jam, just like the metaphor of the rhizome, ‘establishes connections between semiotic chains,

organizations of power and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences and social struggles’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 7). By establishing these different

interconnections it cuts across and blurs the analytical and essentialist divides between civil society activism, the state and the market, as well as dichotomous

boundaries between mainstream and alternative forms of media. What jammers are doing, and especially the way in which they do it, is increasingly being co-opted by

government-supported organizations—in information campaigns, for example, and by market actors—in their attempts to catch the public’s attention or modify their ‘corporate’ image and identity, in effect going beyond counter-hegemony. Many

activists also acknowledge that for an action to be successful it is not enough to communicate to a small community—or ghetto—of like-minded citizens, be it local

or spread around the world (Gamson & Wolfsfeld, 1993, p. 116). While mainstream media are often rightly criticized for their uncritical allegiance to the dominant

political and economic order (Lemieux, 2000), they remain essential to reach a large audience. The metaphor of the rhizome thus also points to the idea that

communicating in an independent way through alternative means of communication and transmitting the critical counter-messages within a mainstream context are both interconnected and equally important.

We will return to these theoretical issues below. But first, the cultural and political jam has to be historically contextualized, linking it to artistic and cultural movements

such as Dadaism, surrealism, Fluxus and situationism. Next, the notion of political jamming will be developed further as the use of cultural jamming techniques in

(alternative as well as mainstream) political communication. Finally, the role of the Internet will be discussed as an additional, albeit important, means of distribution that

allows the jam to spread, very much like a (media) virus.

Some History

The germs of what today is called cultural jamming—or political jamming for that

matter—can be traced back to several art movements dating back to the beginning of the last century.

First, the idea of attributing a different meaning to an object can be found in the

famous ‘objets-trouvés’ or ready-mades of Marcel Duchamp and Dadaism after the First World War. Second, cultural jamming also pays tribute to the optical illusions of

surrealists, such as René Magritte, often cunningly devised to confuse the audience. Third, the art movement Fluxus, taking Dadaism further and establishing itself as a

counter-artistic movement involved with social action, can also be related to cultural jamming.

3 Fluxus explicitly integrated making art with cultural and socio-political

criticism of society and the way it functions (cf. Figure 2). The phrase ‘Duchamp has qualified the object into art, I have qualified life into art’ in a piece by Wolf Vostell

from 1972 exemplifies this. What was also emphasized by adopting the name Fluxus

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was the notion of change, interdependence and dynamism, the fast-paced non-static ever-evolving flux that increasingly characterizes life, the world and society. Fluxus was

also influenced by what composer John Cage called the need to depersonalize art and his critique of the artist as somehow a genius (Cage, 1966).

Fourth, situationism and its articulation of ‘détournement’ is probably the most relevant reference to what is today described as cultural jamming. Guy Debord and Gil

Wolman (1956; translation: Knabb, 1981; emphasis added) speak of the ‘serious parody’ in their détournement manual

It is therefore necessary to conceive of a parodic-serious stage where the accumulation of detourned elements, far from aiming to arouse indignation or laughter by alluding to some original work, will express our indifference toward a meaningless and forgotten original, and concern itself with rendering a certain sublimity.

The very idea of the parody with a serious undertone or turning meanings around

resonates with reversing, transgressing or subverting meanings in the definitions of Dery and Jordan quoted above. An example of Situationist art is the use of old cartoons and placing or ‘situating’ one’s own content in the text balloons. Another

much-used Situationist technique is that of the (art-)performance—interventions in the public space as a form of direct action, art as a political act.

Just like Fluxus, Situationist International situated art very much within the context of the everyday and of society, thereby opposing the elitist view that art is somehow

detached from or transcending society and the everyday context of so-called ‘ordinary’

Figure 2 USA Surpasses All the Genocide Records! (Source: George Maciunas, 1965—The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection.)

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people. The Belgian anarchist and Situationist artist Raoul Vaneigem emphasized the everyday context very clearly in his influential book The Revolution of Everyday Life:

Revolution is made everyday despite, and in opposition to, the specialists of revolution. This revolution is nameless, like everything springing from lived experience. Its explosive coherence is being forged constantly in the everyday clandestinity of acts and dreams. (Vaneigem, 1967)

As this quote by Vaneigem and the use of performances/spectacles show, situationism,

again reminiscent of Fluxus, placed art unequivocally within the political realm. ‘Art is revolutionary or is not.’ As such the Situationist were very active in the 1968

spring of dissent in Paris, for example by popularizing surrealist, but nevertheless very meaningful, slogans such as ‘Soyez réalistes, demandez l’impossible!’ or ‘Il est interdit

d’interdire’.4 The movement was also very conscious of the increasingly important mediating role of media in distorting events, truth and experiences and at the same

time commodifying them. This thesis was very much the focus of the famous book La Societé du spectacle by Guy Debord (1967; translation: Knabb, 1981):

In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation. [ . . . ] In a world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false.

Other influences that have shaped cultural jamming include cut-up techniques used in

literature, amongst others by Brion Gysin and William Seward Burroughs (Beiles et al., 1960) and the anarchistic DIY culture within the punk movement at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s. The work of Jamie Reid can also be referred to in

this regard—he was responsible for the famous covers of the Sex Pistols (Reid & Savage, 1987). Finally, the notion of cultural jamming also relates very much to the

notion of ‘bricolage’, defined by Hartley (2002, p. 22ff.; emphasis added), with reference to the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, as: ‘the creation of objects

with materials to hand, re-using existing artefacts and incorporating bits and pieces’. Today’s jammers have adopted, transformed and applied the different ideas that these

artistic and cultural movements provided to the current economic, political and technological context. There is clearly a pattern of continuity, not only in terms of the strategies and techniques being used but also in relation to the transnational character of

the movements described above. Besides this, as will be explored below, there are also patterns of discontinuity that can be observed, especially in the modes and means of

distribution, but also in terms of content going beyond counter-hegemonic practices.

Jamming the Political

In this article I would like to highlight the use of détournement, intrusion,

transgression and interceptions in the political realm. While recent conceptualizations of cultural jamming, as outlined above, are directed at the corporate world and its

brands culture, recent evolutions have seen a shift in the use of cultural jamming as a

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technique towards the more overtly political. This is not to say that cultural jamming of corporate actors and brand culture is not political, but the focus of the political jam

is clearly different in that it relates more to politics as such and is directed against policies by governments, or acting against formal political actors, such as political

parties, against undesirable behaviour in society or even at times against minorities in society. This also shows that the ‘political’ jam is not inherently progressive. While the

classic cultural jam is generally portrayed and constructed as the fight of David—the inventive ‘funny’ activists—against Goliath—the mighty evil corporate world, the use

of détournement in a more political context can also express feelings of intolerance, public hatred towards a common demonized enemy, such as Osama bin Laden for example, or blatant racism towards ethnic minorities.

First, a number of examples of political jams will be analysed. The selection of examples reflects the rhizomatic model in the sense that cultural jamming techniques

are being used by citizens and civil society activists to denounce policies by governments, to disseminate alternative discourses, but increasingly also by more

formal political actors in information or election campaigns. Second, we will assess the role of the Internet as a means of distributing political jams and again relate this to the

rhizome in the sense of overcoming the analytical distinction that is often made between so-called new and old media.

Different Cases of Jamming the Political Some billboard activists, very much at the core of the cultural jamming movement, have

shifted their attention from attacking the corporate world and its advertising to the use of purely political messages directed against dominant political thinking. Ron English is a master of the art of subversion, as he calls it. On his website5 several examples of

political jams can be found, such as sampling Picasso’s famous Guernica painting and placing ‘The New World Order’ over it, or billboards with the slogans: ‘Jihad is Over (If

You Want It)’ or ‘One God, One Party—Republicans for a dissent free theocracy’. This type of activism also shows that the street is increasingly becoming a space for political

alternative discourses to be ‘advertised’. In many countries radical activists frequently use stickers, for example, to voice dissent. These types of engaged street art6 seek to

subvert and at the same time reclaim public spaces with counter-messages. The street is also the space where political resistance is being ‘performed’ and

articulated through demonstrations. During the big demonstrations against

international organizations such as the G8, the European Union, as well as the recent anti-war demonstrations, citizens and civil society organizations frequently use

political jamming techniques to convey their subverting counter-messages. For some the act of demonstrating becomes a performance in the sense that the Situationists

perceived it. This relates to what Scott and Street (2001, p. 42) call ‘the aestheticisation of politics’. In the different, almost carnivalesque, and sometimes even party-like

demonstrations echoes can be found of the ironic detoured Situationist-slogans used in the May ’68 protest in Paris. In the United States a protester walked around draped

in a US-flag, his mouth covered with tape and carrying a sign that said ‘Patriot Act’

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(Cole, 2003). In the United Kingdom, anti-war protest demonstrators sung: ‘We all live in a terrorist regime’ to the tune of the 1966 Beatles song ‘Yellow Submarine’.

Other interlinked examples of these kinds of performative subversions are slogans such as ‘Peace is Patriotic’ or ‘War is Terrorism’ that found their way into anti-war

protests throughout the world, which also exemplify the transnational character of jamming, as well as its viral and copyright-free features. This can also be related to

people carrying prints from jams downloaded from the Internet and the dynamic interactions between the online and the offline.

Performance is also central to activists such as the Yes men,7 who famously impersonated a spokesperson for Dow Chemicals on BBC World, claiming that Dow would compensate victims of the chemical disaster in Bhopal, India. A similar example

was the 2004 campaign ‘Billionaires for Bush (or Gore)’ against corporate control of politics in the United States, again hacking into the mainstream media. This was a

deliberate tactic to catch the attention of the mainstream media and thus the public at large, as Boyd (2002)—one of the activists—states: ‘if the media wanted the humour

(and they did), they had to take the content too. The materials were catchy and accessible and the action model was easy to DIY. Thus the meme “spread, replicated,

and mutated”.’ As such, the main aims of their performances are to jam the media and reclaim the tools of communication from the state and the market, as the title of Gareth Branwyn’s citizen’s guide suggests (Branwyn, 1997).

Mainstream media also increasingly use jamming techniques in their satirical humour programmes. The increased use of formats allows comedians to play with

these, adopting the formats but subverting them at the same time. Such comedy shows hack human-interest-type programmes, infotainment, as well as traditional current

affairs programmes. Examples of these are: ‘In de Gloria’ produced by Woestijnvis for the Dutch-speaking Belgian public broadcaster, mocking the human-interest genre,

‘Broken News’ on the BBC, jamming TV news, as well as infotainment kinds of formats or the Today show with Jon Stewart in the United States, who regularly uses

jamming techniques. The examples above all show the rhizomatic behaviour of the jam, breaking down

and transgressing established analytical distinctions such as online/offline or

alternative/mainstream. Besides this, when analysing the jamming phenomenon, it also becomes apparent that it is not performed merely by ‘fringe’ activists, but by all

actors within the political domain. Just like with the more classic ‘corporate’ cultural jams, civil society actors also

increasingly use cultural jamming techniques in their political communication and politically oriented campaigns. In the run-up to the 2003 European and regional

elections in Belgium, an Antwerp-based multicultural radio station, supported by a broad coalition of local civil society organizations, including several allochthanous organizations, labour unions, gay organizations, even some private-sector actors (such

as a discotheque), and supported by a large number of individuals, launched a campaign to counter the propaganda by the north Belgian neo-fascist party ‘Vlaams

Blok’. 8 The ‘Hate is No Solution’ campaign was set up to counter the essentialist

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discourses being voiced by the nationalistic fascist party and to promote mutual understanding and respect between the different communities in Antwerp and

Flanders. While the original campaign used slogans such as: ‘Less Immigration, More Flanders’ or ‘Less Crime, More Flanders’, the counter-campaign reversed this by using

the same layout and colours but with a completely different message, such as ‘More Heart, Less Hate’ (cf. Figure 3) or ‘More Dialogue, Less Hate’.

Forty thousand of these political jams were also printed in the form of posters. As citizens were encouraged to put them up, they could be seen throughout the city.

Alternatively the posters could be downloaded from the Internet, again showing these two sides of both mobilizing through the Internet and at the same time having a visible presence in the offline world. In the United Kingdom, activists in the anti-war

campaigns against the New Labour government have been using similar tactics. One group subverted the original Saatchi campaign against Labour by appropriating the

slogan ‘Labour isn’t Working’ but adding ‘For Peace’ and the line of unemployed on the original poster was replaced by a line of bombs.

Political parties themselves have also appropriated jamming techniques in their political marketing campaigns. A prime example of this is the use of fake movie posters

in party election broadcasts, as well as on huge billboards, by New Labour in the 2001 general election campaign in the United Kingdom. One featured William Hague, the then Tory party leader, with the haircut of Margaret Thatcher combined with the slogan

‘Get out to Vote or They Get In’. Another poster related to the high number of houses being repossessed by banks as a result of high interest rates and read ‘Return of

the Repossessed’ with the Tory leaders depicted as zombies, with the subtitle ‘No Home

Figure 3 Jamming the Extreme Right (Source: left—http://www.vlaamsblok.be; right— http://www.haatisgeenoplossing.be)

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is Safe from Spiralling Tory Interest Rates’. The third jammed film-poster that Labour used was called ‘Economic Disaster II’ starring Michael Portillo as Mr Boom and

William Hague as Mr Bust, ‘coming to a home, hospital, school and business near you’ (cf. Figure 4).

This use of humour with a serious undertone in a political campaign, though perceived by some observers as very populist, did strike a chord with the (young)

electorate and was intended to convince voters that the Tory party was not to be trusted as well as to induce fear of a Tory victory. Moreover, it gave New Labour free

publicity by the mainstream media in an until then rather dull and uninspiring election campaign. In this regard Smith (2001, p. 1003) claims that:

Humour was used to good effect in 2001 to position the opposition negatively (à la Hague with Thatcher’s hair) and may increase in the future. It offers the desired effect whilst not alienating those who dislike personal negative advertising [ . . . ] it seems likely that greater creativity and scope will develop—if for no other reason than the electorate is increasingly sophisticated and unimpressed by traditional negative approaches.

Finally, public information campaigns, although less prominent, also at times use cultural jamming techniques to convey messages of public interest. An example of this

is a controversial campaign by a Dutch semi-public organization called SIRE, focusing on the anti-social and rude behaviour of citizens and youngsters. The title of the

campaign was ‘Society is You’. It used the metaphor of children’s booklets, hacking Dick Bruna’s simplified but highly successful images with a similar layout and

language.9 This refers also in part to the détournement of cartoon balloons by the Situationists. In Figure. 5 a grandmother is depicted accompanied by the following text: ‘Mies sits in the tram. There comes grandmother. ‘Can I sit there? I am old and

Figure 4 Campaign Poster of New Labour used in the 2001 Campaign (Source: New Labour, TBWA-London.)

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a bit tired’. ‘Piss off you old cow’, says Mies. Grandmother is crying. Mies is Happy.

Now she can remain seated’ (translation by the author). Others related to the chanting of anti-Semitic slogans by football supporters, sexual harassment of women, or using a

mobile in the cinema. In addition to the posters, radio ads using children’s music and the texts were also produced and transmitted.

Interestingly enough, this campaign was designed by the private advertising agency Lintas, again showing the blurring of boundaries between civil society, formal political actors and the private sector, to which the rhizome also refers.

To complete the circle, this campaign in turn was hacked and mocked by activists and citizens playing around with the same idea of children’s imagery and language, but

using different targets for their mockery, often in a none-too-innocent way and often not in the public interest. In a sense this could be seen as a parody of the parody.

Examples of the latter are a number of similar jams joking about (hard) drug use or worse voicing racist discourses and prejudices against migrant populations. One pretty

disgusting example of this has an angry, weeping allochthanous child on the left and the following message on the right: ‘Hassan is mad. He said to girl: ‘you cannot see

Moroccans’. Girl nevertheless sees Moroccans. Hassan rapes girl with 13 friends. Well done Hassan. This is real integration’ (cf. Figure 6; translation by the author). These examples show that political jams are not progressive per se, but can also contain

essentialist racist (counter-)discourses that could be considered as anti-public spheres.

The Internet as a Means of Distribution for Jams Although some research has been published recently in terms of the use of the Internet

by activists (Meikle, 2002; Jordan, 2002; Couldry & Curran, 2003; Atton, 2004),

Figure 5 Jamming in Public Communications Strategies (Source: http://www.sire.nl)

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it remains difficult to assess exactly how far and extensive the distribution of jams is,

but it would be fair to state that many Internet users worldwide have at one time or another received a political jam in their mailbox. Moreover, world events or conflicts

such as 9/11 and the subsequent US-led wars against the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Baath regime in Iraq have resulted in a huge increase in the number of political

jams, usually distributed and dispersed through the Internet (Ellis, 2002; Frank, 2004). Figures 7 and 8 provide a few examples of this. They came to me via e-mail or were

found on sites dedicated to these kinds of jams. As such, there are no sources available for many of these jams, which in itself is significant.

A well-known and widely distributed political jam is the poster of Star Wars, re-engineered to Gulf Wars, Episode II—Clone of the Attack. Similar jams of movies or TV series, using 9/11, Bush, Osama bin Laden or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

include, amongst others, the Matrix, Face/Off, Escape from New York, Natural Born Killers, Terminator, the Tele(terror)tubbies or the 1980s TV series the A-team.

Besides films or TV series, cartoons like South Park, the Simpsons, or Spiderman, and computer games like Flight Simulator, SimCity, or Tomb Raider have also been jammed

to mock recent US politics. The technique of photo doctoring is also often used to fake images such as Saddam

Hussein being presented as a DJ, George Bush morphed with Osama bin Laden, or, less innocent, a picture of Mecca with a plane heading towards the Kaäba with the subtitle ‘An eye for an eye’, or variations on that theme (cf. Figure 8). This again shows that

Figure 6 Jamming the Jam (Source: from the author’s archive.)

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political jamming is not only ‘performed’ by progressive voices and activists but also

serves to ridicule, humiliate or victimize the common enemy or the personification of evil at that given moment. As Silverstone (2006, p. 75) states ‘[e]vil is the signal

expression of otherness, of the other as malevolant, in a world governed by God’. It is therefore not unsurprising that religion is a prime target in this regard, . . . . Religion is a prime target in this regard, as is shown in Figure 8 with the depiction of Osama bin

Laden with pigs, a severe insult to Muslims worldwide, and also in the détournement of the French sports newspaper L’Équipe, representing the 9/11 World Trade Center

attack as a goal in a deadly football match between religions.

Figure 7 Jamming the War on Terror (Source: from the author’s archive.)

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Besides these, it is fair to state that there are thousands of other examples of similar political jams circulating on the Internet. Also, they cannot be reduced to criticizing or

even supporting US policies with regard to Iraq or Afghanistan, but relate as much to other (local) political contexts and issues.

The Internet serves, in this regard, very much as a new means of distribution and its viral characteristics allow the cultural or political jam to spread very quickly across

borders and at minimal costs to the producers. Citizens forward the jam to their professional and/or personal networks who then in turn spread it further (Frank, 2004,

p. 637). Peretti (2001) also emphasizes this decentralized distribution feature of the Internet when he contemplates the effects of his Nike jam:

The dynamics of decentralized distribution systems and peer-to-peer networks are as counterintuitive as they are powerful. By understanding these dynamics, new forms of social protest become possible, with the potential to challenge some of the constellations of power traditionally supported by the mass media.

Figure 8 Essentialist Jamming (Source: from the author’s archive.)

Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 85

However, it would be wrong to overemphasize the importance of the Internet. Some of the examples put forward in this article point to the fact that other media are equally,

or indeed even more, important in spreading the counter-discourses beyond the cosy circle of the like-minded. The coalition of civil society organizations that initiated the

counter-campaign against the fascist party in Antwerp built a nice website, but nevertheless had 40,000 posters printed to be visible in the streets throughout the city,

which also in part contributed to their action receiving attention in the mainstream press. Transgressing the boundaries between alternative media spheres and the

mainstream public sphere, as well as between old and new media, is crucial in this regard. When referring to tactical media as a form of digital interventionism, the Critical Art Ensemble (2002, p. 7) states the following: ‘By “digital” CAE means that

tactical media is about copying, re-combining, and re-presenting, and not that it can only be done with digital technology.’ This points to a non-deterministic perspective

with regard to media and technology, as well as breaking down dichotomies between different kinds of media, as implied by the metaphor of the rhizome.

Although the Internet plays an ever-increasing role in building and maintaining networks, in the distribution of new ideas, tactics and strategies, in informing

independently at low cost, in decentralizing political action, this should be seen in conjunction with other media usages and not in a dichotomous perspective of ‘old’ versus ‘new’ media. In addition, we also see that jams at times make it into the

mainstream media or popular culture.

What to Make of All This?

Although the notions of cultural and political jamming are fairly new, they should be

seen within an evolutionary perspective of the relationship between culture and politics or more specifically between art and social struggles. Cultural/political

jamming also embodies the de-elitization of art and allows the citizen/activist to voice dissent and challenge dominant discourses in society. Moreover, patterns of

discontinuity can also be observed. In particular, they refer to the means of distribution of jams, where the Internet plays a pivotal role in spreading the jam very

much like a virus. However, the street and classic media still play an important role in communicating the jam beyond the (rather fragmented) subaltern public spheres.

When we look at the use of cultural jamming techniques in the political realm from a

public sphere perspective, they do produce a wide diversity of subverting narratives and alternative discourses. Democracy needs contestation, as well as the acknowledgement

that there are different interests at play that need to be made visible and explicit. In many ways, politics ceases to be politics when all discourses converge on the so-called ‘radical

centre’, when antagonisms are denied or silenced. Fragmented sphericules that operate sometimes outside and at other times in partial overlap with the dominant mainstream

public sphere, and where new ideas of citizenship and of participation are deepened, debated and consulted, are in themselves not to the detriment of democracy, provided

these ideas permeate the dominant public sphere to a wider audience of citizens at some

86 B. Cammaerts

point in time. This also relates to what Deleuze and Guattari (1987, pp. 216 – 217) call the ongoing negotiations between the molecular or micro level of politics and the molar

or the structural segmentations at a macro-political level: ‘Molecular escapes and movements would be nothing if they did not return to the molar organizations to

reshuffle their segments, their binary distributions of sexes, classes and parties.’ But how far can we stretch Mouffe’s plea for a radical plurality of voices? Does it, for

example, include the racist discourses as seen in the Dutch case? Mouffe (1997, p. 18) herself suggests that certain limits should be observed when placing radical plurality

central to democracy. The democratic culture of tolerance, solidarity, equality and freedom has to be accepted as hegemonic. Discourses, as present in anti-public spheres, challenging the very nature of that democratic culture such as negationism,

(verbal) gay bashing, blatant racism, promotion of hatred, violence and other essentialisms are problematic and undoubtedly raise questions regarding freedom of

speech and the limits thereof. A rhizomatic approach to media activism, as developed by Carpentier et al., (2003) in

terms of community media, proves to be an adequate model to also frame the notion of jamming, both in its corporate as well as more overtly political focus. It allows us to see

the jam as nomadic, moving from autonomous public spheres to counter-public spheres to the mainstream public sphere, thereby disturbing or deterritorializing, as Deleuze and Guattari would say, the status quo. It also refers to interlinkages between

citizens, civil society, the state and the market, as well as the appropriation of jamming techniques by these different actors. Furthermore, it also allows us to go beyond the

dichotomous representations of old versus new media and to see them in conjunction and interaction with each other instead of essentializing them.

However, although the rhizomatic approach does capture—metaphorically—the way in which jamming transgresses boundaries, it does not problematize this enough

in terms of power and counter-hegemony. This brings us to the following question: what difference do these phenomena make

at a macro-political level? Do they really challenge hegemonic power constellations? The answer to this is not, of course, straightforward. As shown above, the technique of jamming is increasingly being appropriated by reactionary and ‘mainstream’ actors,

including market actors, attempting to unjam the jam. The interplay between the micro political—where the jam can often be situated—and the macro political is also a

complex and dynamic process that cannot be understood within a linear, causal relationship of stimulus – response. However, effects can sometimes be seen, but clearly

in combination with other forms of direct action—an example being jams directed against (some) corporations. Companies such as Shell, Esso, Nike and McDonalds, for

example, are slowly beginning to see that their corporate image is being damaged by a sustained protest campaign whereby cultural jamming is only one facet, as consumer boycotts are much more powerful in terms of actually accomplishing (minor) results.

Also, the attention of cultural jammers is often quite selective—while McDonalds is being targeted, Burger King or Wendy’s is not. However, effect (right now) is perhaps

the wrong question here. Changing social, political and/or cultural values is a slow

Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 87

process that needs to be contextualized and placed in a long-term perspective (cf. Hall, 2002, p. 25 – 26). Furthermore, as has been shown, jammers focusing on

politics are much more diverse ideologically and also voice sentiments of hatred and violence, essentializing entire (religious) communities and populations. This is far

removed from the revolutionary ideals of the Fluxus and Situationist legacies that saw in détournement a way of inciting citizens to think differently by engaging with them within

their everyday life contexts. However, in a world of green-washing, spin and other newspeaks—the true is a

moment of the false—the jam is no longer inherently progressive, it no longer fosters the ideals of the Enlightenment, and nor does it automatically challenge the status quo or strive to extend rights for citizens at large. Some political actors, as well as

companies, just use jamming techniques as a ‘hip’ political communication strategy, thereby reducing it to a marketing technique—unjamming the jam so to speak. Others

use it to demonize and essentialize a common enemy or ethnic/religious minority. For mainstream broadcasters, jamming is often ‘just entertainment’. It therefore remains

important not to be too celebratory about these phenomena and take into account Baudrillard’s (1987) criticism that media create an over-saturated hyper-reality that

can potentially lead to the implosion of meaning, whereby the jam represents merely another ‘noise’ amongst other noises.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Robin Mansell, Nico Carpentier, Shani Ograd and Margaret Scammell for their valuable comments and insights.

Notes

[1] The result of this campaign can be seen at: http://www.stopesso.org/static/logos.html [2] Chantal Mouffe prefers using the term public spaces, to distinguish herself from the

Habermassian vocabulary of the public sphere (Carpentier & Cammaerts, 2006, p. 973). [3] A recent adbuster campaign, unbrand America, used an American flag with corporate logos

instead of stars. This shows a strong resemblance to the American flag designed by Fluxus artist George Maciunas to protest against American imperialism (cf. Figure 2).

[4] ‘Be realistic—demand the impossible!’/‘It is forbidden to forbid’. [5] See http://www.popaganda.com/ [6] For more examples of street art see http://www.woostercollective.com/ [7] See http://www.theyesmen.org/ [8] As a result of a conviction for disseminating persistent racist discourses ‘Vlaams Blok’ recently

changed its name to ‘Vlaams Belang’, which comes down to a change in form, but not in substance. [9] Dick Bruna is best known for his Miffy (Nijntje in Dutch) character, a rabbit that is universally

appealing to young children.

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