OurSpace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture (review)

In 1976, a New York City performance artist named Joey Skaggs placed a classified ad promoting a nonexistent brothel for pet dogs, which he called the "Cathouse for Dogs." His ad and accompanying press releases generated controversy and media attention, culminating in Skaggs being featured in a televised ABC News story about animal abuse. Facing criminal charges and a subpoena from the attorney general, Skaggs revealed that the Cathouse for Dogs was a hoax, fabricated by using actors he hired to portray "doggie pimps" as well as via a videotape of mating dogs that he provided to ABC.

For Christine Harold, assistant professor of communication at the University of Washington, this rather absurdist and lurid example illustrates the point that media pranking, as executed by Skaggs, has the potential to augment "dominant modes of communication [in a way] that interrupts conventional patterns" (77). Throughout OurSpace, she describes and thoughtfully interprets the rhetorical strategies of different groups of activists and "culture-jammers" who reclaim, subvert, parody, and détourne dominant (oft en corporate) discourse. The book provides both a typology of media-pranking and culture-jamming strategies and an evaluation of their relative efficacies, and is thus clearly intended to be of interest to both scholars and practitioners of these sorts of cultural activism.

Harold discusses cases that span time and media, examining such groups as the Situationists, Adbusters, and The Yes Men in her first three chapters. In her appraisal of these activists, Harold argues that there are fundamental limitations in construing activist work as a binary opposition mounted against corporate cooptation of "authentic" cultural productions. For Harold, although some activist strategies may be more successful than others, there are two main problems with resistance on these grounds: (1) the activist stance is oft en a reactive one, in that the terms of activist response may rely on the audience's recognition of the tropes or logos of corporate branding or advertising, thus failing to subvert what is essentially the hegemony of the corporate discourse; and (2) these strategies tend to reinscribe the notion that an untainted public sphere exists in opposition to, and is constantly under threat of pollution by, corporate culture and discourse. In essence, even the bold move of outright piracy promotes the notion that someone owns the content or code in question, and in this way solidifies the notion that intellectual content is property.

For Harold, there is (or ought to be) a third path that lies between a public space and a marketplace, between a rhetorical autonomous zone populated only by the authentic discourse of citizens and a cultural terrain overrun by the hegemonic signifiers of corporate discourse. Harold views the notion of an untainted public commons as problematic not only because it appeals to a romantic notion of a mythical, free past, and reinforces the idea of cultural products as property, but also because it also casts publics as endangered and fragile. This latter issue is troubling to Harold because, as she states, "it is untenable both as a descriptor of what is or as a ground from which to launch meaningful political intervention" (156–57).

Harold argues that the debate over cultural products should not be circumscribed by the false premise of a proprietary binary in which market or capitalist forces leave untouched or, far more oft en, taint an authentic public or cultural space. Nodding to both Jürgen Habermas's theorization of the public sphere and Michael Warner's work on publics, she wraps up the book by presenting alternative strategies, championing the work of Creative Commons, "copyleft ," and the open content movement. Harold argues that Creative Commons's work constitutes a novel, robust model because it operates within a regime that does not regard ideas and cultural products as scarce. In addition, it dispenses with the notion that alternatives are limited to either freewheeling piracy or intellectual hoarding. Instead, Creative Commons seeks sophisticated, nuanced, and flexible governance alternatives, navigating [End Page 169...