Your Ad Here: The Cool Sell of Guerrilla Marketing

3. Street Spectacle and Subculture Jamming

60 > 61 corporate symbolism that so clutters contemporary environments, but it seems to have also partly succeeded in “rejuvenating” the industry that it was born to parody. This chapter offers a study in the sociology of recuperation to understand how dissidence might be productive and, in fact, necessary to the work of this particular form of governance. Foucault articulates the function of resistance —and the locus of individual agency here—as such: At the very heart of the power relationship, and constantly provoking it, are the recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence of freedom. Rather than speaking of an essential antagonism, it would be better to speak of an “agonism”—of a relationship that is at the same time mutual incitement and struggle; less a face-to-face confrontation that paralyzes both sides than a permanent provocation.4 Advertising represents one such “power relationship” whose attempt to govern the consumer subject has to work with her freedom and, as necessary , finesse a “refusal to submit” that can take shape through an assortment of “counter-conducts.”5 These characterize the project of culture jamming —one whose self-conceit and often “clandestine” political action, whose anti-commercial “objectives and methods” “struggle against the processes implemented for conducting others” in the hopes of “an alternative to governmental direction in the form of another form of conduct” (i.e., not “buying ” into consumer society).6 As the expression of resistance, culture jamming ’s counter-conduct seeks to be “antagonistic” toward advertising as an institution of governance and intends to reclaim authenticity as an experience external to marketed culture. And, yet, contemporary advertising remains a receptive institution when it comes to symbolic impudence—particularly when “cool” is precisely what’s for sale to youth consumers. Thus, the “agonistic” interplay of branding and culture jamming might aptly be framed.7 Governance of free subjects in the marketplace must allow for that “compromise equilibrium” that Gramsci identified—a practice in which power “has continually to be renewed, re-created, defended and modified ” even as it is simultaneously “resisted, limited, altered, challenged by pressures not all its own.”8 One of the ways that governance channels that defiance is by posturing as defiance itself: guerrilla advertising, here, selfeffacing its own power through an anti-establishment ethos and dissident aesthetics, which attempt to absolve any pretense of marketer authority. And for an industry always on the prowl for authenticity, given the perceived cynicism of millennials, that defiance represents a key source of credibility. 62 > 63 from the tactics of culture jammers and street artists who violate similar conventions or improvise with urban environments in order to cast their work. This provocative approach is meant to be a way of demonstrating distance from the image of a didactic, domineering marketer and, like advertainment (see chap. 2), communicating through an unconventional space in which that persuasive influence might come across more casually. It, too, might be thought of as ambient governance but of a more “street” variety, both in the sense of an out-of-home context and a connotative form of resistant identity imprinted on it. Contesting the Brand In recent years, branding has emerged as an explicitly contested political terrain for leftist thinkers and social activists who view the practice as wasteful fetishism—not only in whitewashing environmental degradation and labor inequalities but equally in its pervasion of mental conditions (e.g., its presumptive arbitration of shared meaning; its aims to engineer social dependency; its replacement of a more “authentic” lived experience with a new set of commercially oriented, irrational obsessions). Perhaps none make this case more emblematically than Kalle Lasn and Naomi Klein, whose books have both precipitated and chronicled the rise of culture jamming—branding’s most expressive ideological nemesis amid late capitalism.14 Lasn, the co-founder of Adbusters magazine, has been at the intellectual forefront of shaping the movement, which he places in lineage with Situationist détournement: that “perspective-jarring turnabout in your everyday life” that comes from “rerouting spectacular images, environments, ambiences and events to reverse or subvert their meaning, thus reclaiming them.”15 Led by Guy Debord, Situationism idealized independence from the “‘spectacle’ of modern life”: “Everything human beings once experienced directly had been turned into a show put on by someone else. . . . Immediacy was gone. Now there was only ‘mediacy’—life as mediated through other instruments, life as a media creation.”16 Increasingly, brands themselves seek to furnish...