Unjamming the Insurrectionary Imagination: Rescuing Détournement from the Liberal Complacencies of Culture Jamming

Abstract

1. FORMATIVE IMPASSES AND IMPULSES: POSTMODERN THEORYOr better: one is always located at a post through which various kinds of messages pass. No one, not even the least privileged among us, is ever entirely powerless over the messages that traverse and position him at the post of sender, addressee, or referent.1I begin with three premises: First, the cultural and political impasses that make culture jamming make sense as a viable form of activism were first diagnosed by French and German philosophers in the decades after World War Π. The cultural and political analyses of critical and postmodern theory set the stage for culture jamming. Second, the necessity of a politics of culture jamming was revealed by postmodern theorists as the only practicable modality of intervention given the impasses of the era. Thus, culture jamming is best defined, explained, and justified within the context of postmodern theory, indeed, as a postmodern politics. Third, the ideal articulation of the logic of culture jamming, theorized by Guy Debord in the 1950s, is the version we most urgently need to recover. This last premise contains a normative claim. So, I am not mainly interested in correcting the historical account of culture jamming by way of telling an origins story about where it really comes from. Rather, I set out to rescue the insurrectionary logic of culture jamming from the liberal complacencies that obscure it today. This requires bearing out the premises above.Marxist and post-Marxist philosophers came to some dreadful epiphanies in the decades after World War Π. The 20th century almost totally convinced generations of revolutionaries of the poverty and failure of their own grand narratives about the radical transformation of the world. The anti-Stalinist and anti-statist Left could not find any good reason to continue to place their faith in political parties and classical conceptions of revolution, nor could they find any guarantee on the horizon of an emergent revolutionary movement to resuscitate their optimism. The negativity of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's landmark study, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), would be recast in so many ways, but not easily overcome. The Nazis and Nuremberg revealed the dangers of manipulable masses, bolstering the political significance of the insights of Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich. Diminishing numbers of radicals kept faith that a real challenge to capitalism was emerging anywhere in the atmosphere of the Cold War. A pervasive sense of the poverty and failure of revolution characterized a new impasse facing disaffected radicals everywhere. It is within this context of defeatism and disillusionment that the formative logic of culture jamming was best articulated. The grand idea of a world-historical revolution appeared to be a corpse from the past. But wasn't there still a space for meaningful revolt, and could such a space ever be totally foreclosed? It is within this context that the possibility for negating the negativity of the Left resided. Kindling these embers for a new radical optimism was necessary to the task of rehabilitating a disillusioned Left. This essay critically considers culture jamming as a means for such a task.Clearly then, I shall challenge popular genealogies that trace culture jamming to its coinage in the 1980s and 1990s. I argue for expanding beyond its narrow conceptualization as a tactic of media savvy activists. As media activism or pranking, culture jamming risks becoming a liberal fantasy that gives good news to capitalism: Is this all the Left has left? An insurrectionary logic of culture jamming was articulated in 1956 in Guy Debord's theory of detournement. Detournement means political plagiarism, distortion, hijacking, or otherwise rerouting something against itself. For Debord, detournement was part of a revolutionary project undertaken within the present conditions of oppression, in order to destroy those conditions, and he insisted that [a]n avant-garde cultural movement, even one with revolutionary sympathies, cannot accomplish this. …