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.