Fun and Laughter: Culture Jamming and the Emotional Regime of Late Capitalism

Abstract

In contemporary social movement protest in general and in culture jamming in particular fun and laughter are key ingredients. But why and what is the meaning of fun in protest? These questions are answered by analyzing the various meanings and uses of fun and laughter in culture jamming. The data consist of texts and visuals from the websites of five groups, seven in-depth interviews, two participant observations, and the book Culture Jam. The first part explores the ways that the emotional (sub)regime of culture jamming is contingent upon the dominant emotional regime of late capitalism where fun, too, is a key ingredient. But jammers reject the fun of consumption and offer their own definition of a kind of fun which is real and authentic, e.g. the fun of freedom and protest. Thereby they articulate the inherent tension between ‘real’ and ‘fake’ emotions pertinent to the contemporary commodification of feelings. I further suggest that this tension and its articulations in culture jamming parallels the utopian laughter (genuine and transforming) of the medieval carnival vs the laughter of satire in Bakhtin's classic interpretation of Rabelais. Hence culture jamming is both shaped by the contemporary emotional regime and contesting it, reaching beyond it. The second part shows that fun is also an expression of emotional energy contingent upon successful interaction rituals in exclusive and friendship based protest groups. But as emotional energy, fun in culture jamming also points to the broader field of protest groups – an imagined community – and suggests a link that makes individual and fragmented protest actions nevertheless an expression of a loosely identified collective identity. Last but not less important in the context of contemporary studies of emotions in social movements, my analysis shows that emotions are not only part of movement means but also an end in itself.