Author: Christine Harold

ISBN: 978-0-8166-4954-9 (hc:alk.paper) / ISBN-10.0-8166-4954-5

ISBN: 978-0-8166-4955-6 (pb:alk.paper) / ISBN-10.0-8166-4955-3

As I understand it, the triple purpose of Christine Harold’s book is to delineate the consumer culture of America that many deep thinkers deplore, to describe the strategies used by so-called “activists” to attack it, and to offer an alternative to those strategies.

Harold, assistant professor of communications at the University of Georgia, is not among the deep thinkers who view public life today as having reduced all of us or most of us to mere consumers of whatever the goods and services merchants offer, eviscerating if not obliterating citizenship and rendering “our space” virtually obsolete. Consequently, she is not enamored of the strategies deployed by “activists” to attack what they view as an all-pervasive consumer culture. 

The basic strategy used by the “activists” is known as “culture jamming.” The specific techniques employed in “culture jamming,” especially when aimed at corporate culture, include parodies, hoaxes, pranks, and outright sabotage. Though she obviously enjoys describing them, and perhaps even harbors a bit of admiration for the individuals and groups employing such techniques, Professor Harold views them as ultimately ineffective.

Unfortunately, there are few individuals who will understand the alternative Professor Harold offers to “culture jamming,” and there are even fewer who will bother to read her description of her alternative. That is the result of what happens when an academician who is passionate about her or his subject becomes so immersed in the intellectualizing of it that her or his analysis becomes bogged down in a kind of tortured exposition of the thought process leading to it.  

Take a look, for example, at how Professor Harold intellectualizes her analysis of what she views as ineffective: “pranking repatterns commercial rhetoric less by protesting a disciplinary mode of power (or clogging the machinery of the image factory), than by strategically augmenting and utilizing the precious resources the contemporary media ecology affords…Culture jamming, at its best, multiplies the tools of intervention for contemporary media and consumer activists. It does so by embracing the viral character of communication and culture, a quality long understood by marketers. So-called ‘cool hunters,’ for example, employ the tools of anthropologists, who engage in ‘diffusion research’ to determine how ideas spread through cultures.” And so on and so on, analysis after analysis, deeper and deeper, paragraph after paragraph, page after page, of intellectualizing what is happening. After awhile one wants to say to Professor Harold: “Oh, come off it. Why don’t you just provide some examples of what the ‘activists’ do and state in everyday terminology that someone can understand why as a matter of practicality the status quo is unchanged by their tactics?"

The rhetoric becomes even more tedious and incomprehensible when Professor Harold discusses her alternative to “culture jamming.” Have a look at some of her wording: “Habermas, heavily influenced by a Hegelian dialectic, offers a model of the public that is centrally oriented. Its goal is the reconciliation, or communion, of self and other…It is a telos organized around sameness…If we read Warner’s publics and counterpublics thesis in a way that recognizes that circulation is not necessarily the dialectical opposite of regulation, then we remain open to the ways in which the intensification of regulatory categories (as exemplified by Creative Commons) can actually increase the circulation and vitality of our creative publics…We might also take our cue from the approach being explored by the open content movement, in which a consuming public is understood as an intensification of or an augmentation of the resources and logics markets can afford.’

The concluding sentence of Professor Harold’s book is: “This collective autonomy is made possible only by imagining publics not as embattled and atrophied, but as fluctuating, pervasive, and full of creative potential; not as bodies defined by opposition, but at interconnected and active agents who strategically navigate the vast resources of commercial culture and make them their own.” 

 I doubt that the members of the organizations working to produce a society consisting of human beings who are something more than mere consumers will bother to read Professor Harold’s book or, if they do, will try to understand whatever it is she is talking about. They are in the trenches, while Professor Harold, like so many intellectual equivalents to the wise men of the east scratching their navels as they contemplate the universe, is lost in the clouds.

The above review was contributed by:  Burton H. Wolfe: Burton is an award winning journalist and the author of hundreds of published articles and of books such The Hippies (New American Library), Hitler and the Nazis (Putnam), and Pileup on Death Row (Doubleday).  Wolfe publishes an occasional newsletter called "Burton Wolfe's Internet Rag" and maintains a web site.