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interesting thread.
personally, i am of two minds about this....
i'm not sure that warhol is a good example of culture jamming. the jokes involved with the nature of his work are too inside, the repetition too close to repetition. but you can look at it as a demonstrating *the* problem with the tactic, which charlatan and--gasp--ustwo have pointed out: well two of them:
(a) warhol's series can be seen as a parody of commodity series, of mass produced images, but that are commodities in the sense that they were themselves mass produced images. that's the whole idea of the factory. most of his techniques derive from his background as a commercial painter. they *are* what they are making fun of.
(b) lots of advertising relies on the mocking of advertising to advertise itself as a way of advertising its product.
on the other hand, i like detournement and think that more people should do it more often.
the situationists used this tactic to great effect--they were a huge influence on the way in which the mai 68 in paris unfolded, it's politics and its look. they are the archetype hovering behind the tactic--given the proper situation (sorry) these meta-objects can be of a piece with generating the space to think and act radically differently within a commodity-dominated context.
absent that situation, though, détournement (culture jamming) is probably best understood as the wiki thing says--ephemeral protest actions directed against a commodity spectacle that effectively colonizes even your dreams. think about it: much dream material comes from perceptual data that you filter out, that you in a sense register but which your ability to focus visually shunts to the side---how this works only is paradoxical or curious if you really believe that perception is skullbound (it isn't)...so dreaming is recycling is the generation of "unauthorized" combinations is détournement.
so your unconscious lives are commodity fields.
your fantasies are commodity fields.
your thinking then is repetition.
taken to a limit, it follows that thinking is not thinking at all.
is that accurate?
depends (tm)
will détournement free you?
probably not.
does that mean it is a waste of time?
why would that follow?
nothing to be done, just accept it, you are the colonized, you dream as you are told, nearly.
or little to be done, you are the colonized, but the fact that your dreaming generates gaps or holes in the commodity field makes of dreaming a little space of autonomy.
people get blasé about the cultural environments they move through--if that environment is characterized by saturations of certain types of imagery, then that imagery becomes like wallpaper and who fights wallpaper?
people also confuse aging with accomodation with acquiescence with wisdom.
people think alot of goofy things.
maybe there are no general statements to be made about whether jamming is or is not "effective" because the point of it is in the doing and not in the reception.
maybe looking for someone else to help bump you out of the world of dancing signifiers that move across the giant simulacrum is not much different from not looking for someone else to help bump out out of the world of dancing signifiers that move across the giant simulacrum.
maybe asking "does it work" on spectators is missing the point entirely.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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