nature of our data

nature of our data?

which focuses primarily on the activities of the jammers themselves, and

much less on audience members’ reactions?we portray the espoused and

enacted pedagogy of culture jamming, and at this point can only speculate about how audiences receive that pedagogy; we hope in future research to

focus more on audience reactions. We posit that culture jamming operates

as potentially powerful pedagogy through the ways in which it seeks to

foster participatory cultural production, engages with the learner and the

“teacher” corporeally, and aims to foster the creation of a community

politic. We further argue that culture jamming’s “pedagogical hinge” lies in

the ways it aims to produce a sense of “detournement” in audience

members, which can operate as a form of “transitional space.” Finally, while

we recognize culture jamming’s potential pedagogy of possibility (Giroux 8c

Simon, 1988), our analysis also revealed moments of coercion and

compliance?what we call culture jamming’s “loose pedagogical hinge”?

which can shut down rather than encourage the possibility of counterhe

gemonic transgression (hooks, 1994).

Fostering Participatory, Resistant Cultural Production

Ellsworth (2005) argues that the question of pedagogy is “how to use what

has already been thought as a provocation and a call to invention’ (p. 165,

emphasis ours). Powerful pedagogies thus engage learners

as creators.

Critical pedagogy advocates argue that learners should become cultural

producers and build new, more democratic cultural realities (Giroux,

2004c). One aspect of culture jamming’s potential power as critical peda

gogy, then, lies in how it seeks to foster participatory cultural production. In our current condition of hypercapitalism (Graham, 2006) grounded in

consumption, it is a defiant notion that individuals are capable of and

should be responsible for their own entertainment (Duncombe, 1997); yet

This content downloaded from 132.174.254.159 on Tue, 21 Apr 2015 21:24:42 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

CULTURE JAMMING AS CRITICAL PUBLIC PEDAGOGY 331

it is this very ideal that culture jammers promote. Duncombe (1997) also

posits that current cultural critique necessarily involves

a critique of

con

sumerism, arguing that “any vision of a new world must include a new vision

of how culture and products will be produced and consumed” (p. 105). This new vision involves culture jammers becoming cultural producers and

creators who actively resist, critique, appropriate, reuse, recreate, and alter

cultural products and entertainment.

As evidenced by the varied Buy Nothing Day actions and the other

explications of culture jamming described at the beginning of this article, culture jamming is enacted in many forms, all of which rely on creative

cultural production and ultimately seek to challenge and change dominant

discourses and practices of multinational corporations (Harold, 2004). Duncombe (2002) explains that cultural resisters shift from being consum

ers to being creators; indeed, this is what drove the genesis of Adbusters.

Lasn (2006) explains:

We had this nasty feeling that “we the people” were slowly but surely losing

our

power to sing the songs and tell the stories and generate our culture from the

bottom up. More and more, the stories were being fed to us top-down by TV

networks, ad agencies and corporations . . . [We wanted to take] the storytelling,

culture-generating power back from commercial and corporate forces, (p. 85)

As a form of cultural resistance, then, culture jamming is a “free space”

where artists and activists can “experiment with

new ways of seeing and

being” and where they

can “develop tools and

resources for resistance”

(Duncombe, 2002, p. 5). Adbusters magazine, for instance, encourages

reader submissions; readers create and contribute a majority of text and

artwork in the magazine. These submissions range from “fake ads” (sub

vertisements); to critical musings on