communities are formed

relationship. That is, communities are formed and

maintained as individuals form relationships with each other; as St. Clair

(1998) argues, community is not the result of interaction, it is interaction

itself. Community relationships are also sites of cultural production and

reproduction. In addition, community relationships help to develop and

support shared value systems and social activism (St. Clair, 1998). As we

saw above, engaging corporeally is but one way culture jamming seeks

to

create a sense of community. In addition, the act of collaborative cultural

production?creating culture together?also

discussed earlier, and the act of

sharing that culture with others helps culture jammers and their audiences

move toward creating community. In this way, the public in critical public

pedagogy, includes culture jammers themselves, those witnessing the jams

directly, and those who may interact with media, texts, and artifacts indi

rectly thereafter. Indeed, Duncombe (2002) argues that through this

sharing and creating process, culture thus “becomes a focal point around

which to build a community” (p. 6). For instance, Church of Stop

Shopping member Jason Grote (2002) recalls the sense of community

occurring among culture jammers during recent interventions in the Disney

store:

I have noticed that there is a collective upswell of emotion that seems to occur at

demonstrations, or at least at the good ones. I think it would be dangerous if I were

to feel it more often: a mix of inspiration, sentimentality, camaraderie, self

righteousness, righteous anger, abject fear, and what I think Che Guevara must have

been talking about when he said that the true revolutionary was guided by great

feelings of love: a deep, abiding compassion for everything and everyone, (p. 359)

Kalb (2001), in an article on Reverend Billy, also posits that culture

jamming creates a sense of community among the audiences

or viewers of

jamming activities:

Flooding the halls he [Reverend Billy] performs in with an astonishing torrent of

righteous words about the spell of consumer narcosis, he ends up offering hun

dreds of hard-core artsy skeptics (often in their twenties) their first chance ever to

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338 JENNIFER A. SANDLIN AND JENNIFER L. MILAM

shout “Hallelujah!” and engage in Pentecostal call-and-response. In so

doing, they find themselves possessed of a precious community that is not accessed via flicker

ing screens, as well as a delightful channel for various inchoate angers that he has

done them the service of naming, (p. 164)

Thus, culture jammers like Reverend Billy offer audiences members

ways of relating to each other that they may have never experienced before.

The community culture jammers seek to create is not just any kind of

community, however?it is a

community drawn together with a sense of

political purpose and a community that engages in what Brookfield (2005,

p. 31) calls “political learning.” The creation of community is, in fact,

necessary for the enactment of culture jamming’s politics. Brookfield

(2005), following Gramsci, argues that critical consciousness, or political

learning, cannot form in an individual without that individual becoming

part of a collective public. Critical consciousness thus forms in groups?

communities?as people learn about their common situations and the need

for collective political action. Culture jamming, however, hopes to create

political community through a very different kind of political engagement than traditional party politics or traditional social movement activism.