culture jamming - 2009 - The Yes Men Fix The World

The Yes Men Fix the World
Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno
Arte France
2009
87 minutes

The Yes Men are a pair of culture jamming pranksters whose interventions into media have revealed injustices in the basic structures of contemporary neoliberalist globalization. Their modus operandi has been to mimic the conventional forms by which information is packaged and delivered to contemporary audiences, deliver a message that is absurd, either in the traditional sense or in a modern sense where an inconvenient truth is acknowledged, and then capture the reactions of the audience. The most profound example of this later sense of the absurd which I mentioned, as expressed in the work of The Yes Men, can be seen in this interview wherein one of the Yes Men claim that Dow Chemical will make reparations for Union Carbide's 1984 Bophal (India) disaster, when the company's Bophal plant leaked toxic gasses which almost immediately caused over 15,000 deaths, now that Dow has purchased the guilty company. The result was Dow's stock dropped instantly, revealing the sense of justice encoded into markets, and The Yes Men were instantly acused of giving the people of Bophal false hope.

The film begins with the song 'Get Happy', which I otherwise know from David Lynch's television series Twin Peaks.

This documentary, The Yes Men Fix The World (an irritating title for a film that doesn't actually show them offering solutions) shows The Yes Men going behind the scenes of their own work and following up on its results. They used media to pretend as though officials were acknowledging the errors made in Bophal India, and also in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, and bringing equitable compensation to those affected populations. They visited these locations to speak with people and to ask them if they were filled with false hope, the generic critique of Yes Men interventions by media pundits. Naturally the people of of those locations have very good reason to be angry at the cruelty of governments, corporations, and markets, on a continuing basis and weren't especially put off by the actions of the culture jammers.

The film's revelation that the duo were so often accused of providing false hope is fascinating. Clearly the Yes Men are playing with media to create an image of what justice should look like when filtered through the conventions of contemporary media channels. Of course, when The Yes Men are revealed as tricksters, and media personalities are not including questions about the withholding of justice by the actual offenders in part of their response to the Yes Men's intervention, then they are choosing to protect the image of institutions responsible for disaster.

The Yes Men are media pranksters, and fundamentally this is a documentary about media, chains of communication and representation, the manipulation of symbols, and the public relations industry. TV's are viewed in strange locations, creating juxtapositions of imagery, the sleek PR television image against what is often a post-industrial setting, for our own consumption via our own screen. I'm not pointing that out to note any irony, but I do believe that the production of a documentary like this serves the purpose of giving the Yes Men a forum for responding to their own imagery and the responses it garnered in turn, since they're used to making images with other people's machinery.

anti-globalization - book - 2003 - We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism

We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism
Notes from Nowhere Collective (editors)
Verso
2003
521 pages

Hello out there on the internet!  I borrowed We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism from the Toronto Public Library.

There are at least two texts that are fundamentally important to the study of the worldwide movement to resist globalization.  The first of these texts is Naomi Klein’s No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, which examines the global effects of consumer branding and its associated activities, with regards to consumption, production, and opposition.  The other text is Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s Empire, a theoretical text proposing that a shift in political and social organization has occurred from a period of modernist capitalism to a postmodernist ‘empire’ oriented around networks and perpetual crisis.  We Are Everywhere can be added to this list as a companion text that details numerous accounts of resistance to the damaging actions of multi-national corporations and international administrative organizations.  

We Are Everywhere is a book assembled by the Notes from Nowhere Collective, a group of western (I gather from reading each member’s brief bio at the back of the book that most of them are from the U.K. although at least one member appears to be American) writers, educators and activists.  They are all involved with other activist media outlets and events such as Indymedia and Reclaim the Streets parties.  Through their engagement with an international activist media, and with anti-globalization efforts in their home countries, the collective appeared to develop a holistic view of the worldwide activist scene, which they brought to this text.  

We Are Everywhere is a comprehensive series of dispatches, written by a large number of different writers and in a number of different forms, from the global anti-capitalist movement.  The book includes articles and anecdotes about various actions, writings whereby individuals representing an activist group survey that groups actions, photo-essays and interviews with activists.  The book also maintains a timeline, of events of significance to the anti-globalization movement, that runs along a bottom register of most of its pages.  

In addition to its wide array of textual forms, We Are Everywhere strives to be truly global in its scope. The Notes from Nowhere collective begin the book with accounts of the 1994 events in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas surrounding the foundation of the ELZN movement and their demands for autonomy for the indigenous populations of that region.  Thus the book charts a history of international activism that begins in January 1994 in Mexico and attempts to include pieces on actions and protests from as many different locales as possible, from Mexico to Italy, Kenya, Brazil, Paupa New Guinea and so forth, everywhere, ending with a 2003(?) interview with South African activist and intellectual, Ashwin Desai.  In Empire, Hardt and Negri discuss how multi-national corporations have realized some of the ideas put forth by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, where the localized nodes of networked corporations can adjust their operations to suit the contours of the location.  Many pieces featured in We Are Everywhere describe the unique tactics of protest and sabotage developed by local activist organizations in counter-force to shape-shifting corporations. Furthermore, many pieces describe anti-globalization protests as carnivalesque (c.f. Reclaim the Streets), and out of the hundreds of black-and-white photos featured in the book many of them depict protesters in costume and blur the lines between revelry and serious political activity.  

The Notes from Nowhere collective have compiled a volume that fits into a book-type that attempt to survey a global activist scene.  Other such books include The New Revolutionaries, edited by Tariq Ali, which represents the global far-left scene of the 1960s, and Goran Therborn’s From Marxism to Post-Marxism?, which surveys Marxist activity worldwide in the contemporary period.  Ali’s book is primarily written by well-known movement intellectuals and spokespeople, and From Marxism is the work of a single author.  The editors of We Are Everywhere give voice to the participants of the movement and its associated sub-movements, and provides a view into global efforts to confront global capital between the years 1994 and 2003.  

Related: see the Signalfire blog for daily accounts of anti-globalization activity, workers strikes, student protests and general unrest from around the world.

anti-globalization - book - 2007 - What Would Jesus Buy?: Fabulous Prayers in the Face of the Shopocalypse

What Would Jesus Buy?: Fabulous Prayers in the Face of the Shopocalypse
Reverend Billy
PublicAffairs
2006
214 pages

Reverend Billy (aka Billy Talen) is the figurehead of an anti-globalization activist group called The Church of Stop Shopping (at some point since 2006 it has been rechristened The Church of Life After Shopping).  The Church is essentially a radical theater troupe with an activist focus on critiquing conspicuous consumption in America via performing a parody of Pentecostal revival meetings in public settings.  The Church of Stop Shopping is one of a number of “culture jamming” activist groups that emerged from the mid-90s to the early 2000s to combine media theory, performance, and radical politics (c.f. The Yes Men for another example of such groups) into an overall strategy for direct action activism that looks back to the 1960s Yippies and Digger movements.  

Talen’s group of pseudo-revival anti-capitalists is interesting for a number of reasons.  While a number of religious groups are already heavily involved with social justice movements (c.f. some of the recent works by Marxo-Catholic literary theorist, Terry Eagleton, such as Reason, Faith and Revolution, also Goran Therborn discusses such activity in his short survey of global Marxism, From Marxism to Post-Marxism?), Talen, who takes on the appearance of a slick and savvy preacher when he performs, adopts the form of spiritual representation most closely associated with ‘televangelism’ and the American religious right.  Talen subverts that religious form by investing it with anti-capitalist fervor but he also maintains the ecstatic immanence of the Pentecostal revival, projecting it onto the image-addicted, senses-deadened shopper of the heavily mediated contemporary urban environment.  

What Would Jesus Buy?: Fabulous Prayers in the Face of the Shopocalypse appears to be a book of different aspects of the Church of Stop Shopping experience transposed into text.  The first few chapters are, presumably, transcriptions of some of Reverend Billy’s sermons, replete with neologisms such as “Change-a-lujah!”, words that combine the ecstasy of gnostic exclamations with the soundbyte quality of political slogans.  Thankfully, Billy included a glossary of these terms at the end of his book.  Billy moves from his sermons into describing what motivates his group to act, and describes some of the lead-up to an action.  The Church of Stop Shopping performs often in public or in private (commercial) spaces, and while their actions often appear spontaneous, Talen insinuates that there is careful planning involved when he alludes to having cues that he waits for before springing into full reverend mode.  The book also describes a cross-country tour the Church went on, that brought them to locations such as the Wal-Mart head office and culminated in a visit to Disneyland.  This tour is also covered in a 2007 documentary about the Church, also called What Would Jesus Buy? that is viewable on video.google.com and in segments on Youtube (here's part 1):

What Would Jesus Buy? is an odd book.  It is a textual counterpart to a documentary film, and to a performance group, and naturally the experience of reading the book cannot be the same as crossing the path of a Reverend Billy performance action in person.  Talen’s text is not exactly a strong critique of consumer culture but it is amusing relief from reading heavy anti-globalization texts like Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s near-500 page opus, Empire.  The book is, however, useful to anyone conducting research on radical street theater.  Furthermore, there is something interesting about the (fairly long) segment of the book that includes Talen’s responses to individuals who left messages or ‘confessions’ on the Church of Stop Shopping website.  The impression is created that there are many people out there who do seek Talen’s counseling regarding their consumption habits, and Talen always obliges these seekers in his Reverend Billy voice.  This recalls the criticism that Raymond Williams leveled against advertising as a kind of imagery that adopts the forms and representational modes of spiritual art while emptying out it spiritual content.  It also recalls numerous suggestions made by cultural commentators that consumerism leaves people spiritually unfulfilled.  While Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping (now Life after Shopping) may not be a real reverend and church, they ironically seem to return some form of spirituality to the lives of people made desolate by consumerism.

anarchism, anti-globalization - book - 2000 - Days of War, Nights of Love

Days of War, Nights of Love
Crimethinc Ex-Workers Collective
2000
CrimethInc

Available in PDF format from http://www.daysofwarnightsoflove.com/

This book, the first full book published by the CrimethInc Ex-Workers collective, can be read as a poorly developed collection of ideas about capitalism, the media, work, and everyday life.  The collective is described, on their website, as a “decentralized anarchist collective composed of many cells which act independently in pursuit of a freer and more joyous world.”  I take that statement to mean that there is a small group of actual members directly involved in the work of writing and publishing the books and pamphlets they release... and that’s it.  The independent cells referred to are likely any show of activism that occurs   Days of War is useful to researchers in the sense that it is a quintessential manifestation of a radicalism that admires historical radical leftism yet lacks the will to develop a coherent philosophy of its own.  The book reads as a tribute to personal zines of the 1990s, hardcore punk, and the underground radical press of the 1960s. Futhermore in its graphic array much inspiration has been drawn from Situationism, albeit CrimethInc's text is lacking in the intellectual rigor the French neo-Marxists once displayed.  


This book is a series of rants, driven by a collection of angry attitudes directed towards ‘capitalism’ and anything hegemonic.  I characterize the philosophical program of the text to be incoherent because its authors do not establish any kind of analytic framework.  The attitudes represented by this book are quite commonly expressed in zines, on the Internet, and less intellectually focused journals of radical ideas, like Adbusters (although Adbusters tends to accompany their luke-warm critiques with interesting images).  Days of War, Nights of Love emerges from a strained point of view where its writers have chosen to articulate, over three hundred pages, that action is more important than developing theory.  So while in its presentation, the book appears to benefit from a history of radical slogans and images, it appears to disavow that history while simultaneously ignoring the base of ideas and radical thought those slogans and images emerge from.  Ultimately, what this book conveys most strongly is a desperation by its authors to speak out against the things they hate, without considering the form of their statements or whether or not their utterances have previously been uttered.

Days of War also plays with history in strange ways that I suspect pertain to little more than the prejudices of the authors.  One particular example is a description of the prank pulled by Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and friends in 1967 when they threw several hundred dollars in cash onto the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange.  While the CrimethInc Collective lauded the action, they simply described its actors as friends of Black Panther leader, Eldridge Cleaver.  Not only were the fellows in question NOT friends with Cleaver, they were famous sixties radicals in their own right.  So why erase their names?  Is there some vestigial hatred of Hoffman of the Yippies!?  Are they not to be named, even if their actions are to be admired?  Is there a vestigial admiration of Cleaver and the Black Panthers as the exemplars of American radicalism?  If that is the case then that is the exact same attitude many late-sixties American radicals held towards the Panthers.... during the late-sixties.

This book strives to be a forceful message of radical urgency.  It does not contain a single unique idea.  In fact, in its incoherence Days of War, Nights of Love manages to convey an implicit support for consumerism, embedded near to the surface of its passages calling for perpetual pleasure.  What is interesting about Days of War, Nights of Love is its appearance as a pastiche or an agglomeration of a number of distinct strains of twentieth century radicalism.  Furthermore, it is interesting because it valorizes anti-intellectualism, another theme of the 1960s (see Counterrevolution and Revolt by Herbert Marcuse for a critique of anti-intellectual tendencies among 1960s radicals), and it strives to make a virtue of its own incoherence.

anti-globalization - film - 2002 - Video Active 4

Video Active 4
Toronto Video Activist Collective
2002

Hi out there in the Cyberweb!  I borrowed Video Active 4 from the Toronto Zine Library.

Video Active 4 is a compilation of video shorts by the Toronto Activist Video Collective, a loosely organized group of activist filmmakers who first came together in 1998.  The content of Video Active 4  is a collection of documentaries about various demonstrations and protest actions.  Most of the films document direct actions in Canada, however some are based on events that occured elsewhere.  Two films are shot in countries other than Canada, they are La Lucha Sigue by Tony Neale, which documents EZLN summit activity in Mexico, and Gustavo Benedetto Presente by Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein, about a protester named Gustavo who was murdered by police firing indiscriminately into a crowd.  These two shorts bring some variety in message and style to the compilation, much of the imagery of each film is remarkably similar to one-another.

Many of the films primarily focus upon the aesthetics of protest action, with little focus on the issues that were driving protests.  This was especially frustrating with the film called Map of a Restless Northwest, about an organization called Pacific North West Economic Region.  There was little explanation of what this organization actually was, or what it’s purpose is, what kind of threat it presents and who is threatened by it.  The video weaves together footage of an activist leader speaking at a meeting about their immanent protests and police confrontation, with footage of protesters interacting with police, but it doesn’t explain why this exchange is actually occurring.  

Many of the films follow suit, alternating between a display of action, and brief statements issued by the participants.  These shorts represent protest as carnivalesque action, as exuberant confrontation with police, but not really as collective will to demonstrate opposition to power.  There is rarely rationale presented in these shorts for why the protests being filmed are actually taking place, or why mass protests are appropriate responses - presumably these films are intended for an audience who has already been initiated into the exciting dynamics of direct action protest.  This audience likely does not need to be persuaded against various forms of power, nor does it need to be assured of the meaningfulness of such protest.

This issue of representation is pushed to an absurd limit when it is revealed that one of the film shorts is a music video for a band.  While music videos are known as sites of empty imagery and appropriation, here the most notable thing is that the music is the only thing that makes it different from many of the other films contained on this compilation.  I don’t think I really noticed if the footage used in the music video was unique from the footage used in any of the other shorts.  I don’t think it matters.  

The urgency of most of these films has passed, and now they can serve as somewhat superficial records of the protests of Toronto and elsewhere during the early 00-years.  These videos are low on information but they can still be read as a protest tactic in themselves.  I am unclear of what the effects of such films are other than to excite and steel the resolve of those who are already active in protest.  These shorts display how the activists who engaged in such activities have chosen to represent themselves on video.  There is a sense that the protests being represented are basically intended as large spectacles meant for media reproduction, and films such as those on Video Active 4 are perhaps efforts made by the participants themselves to control that reproduction.

The Toronto Video Activist Collective is still active in 2011.  I do not know if they continue disseminating compilations of their work, however they do maintain a Youtube channel at: http://www.youtube.com/user/TVACdotCA.  Some of the films contained on Video Active 4 are viewable on the TVAC youtube channel page, however their recent material is of much higher quality than the early works, and engages with issues of concern much better than those films.