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<div class="entry">dear IDCers,<br>
<br>
since this is only tangentially related to the thread on the
Twitter revolution, I am starting a new one, hoping to start a
conversation as interesting as the other one.<br>
<br>
Best,<br>
Marco Deseriis<br>
<br>
<br>
***<br>
<br>
<span style="visibility: visible;" id="search"><em></em></span>KC,
Egypt, and Culture Jamming in the Age of Social Media<br>
HTML version: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.thething.it/snafu/?p=605">http://www.thething.it/snafu/?p=605</a><br>
<br>
<br>
A couple of days ago American clothing designer Kenneth Cole
posted a tweet to promote his spring line that read:
<p>"Millions are in uproar in #<span style="visibility: visible;"
id="search">Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring
collection is now available online at <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://bit.ly/KCairo-KC">http://bit.ly/KCairo-KC</a>.</span>"<br>
</p>
<p>Note that the tweet is signed “-KC,” which means that it was
either penned or approved by the designer himself. After
widespread outrage and several parodies on Twitter, Cole deleted
the post and apologized on Facebook. While the apology was <a
href="http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=9291921501&topic=16039">met
with sarcasm and skepticism</a>, somebody decided to take it
one step further and re-posted or rather <i><em>re-pasted</em></i>
the tweet in the form of a slick decal on a <a
href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/04/kenneth-cole-store-twitter-san-francisco_n_818843.html">KC
store window in San Francisco</a>.</p>
<p></p>
<p>In the1980s-1990s culture jammers attacked billboards and TV
ads to denounce the "infoxication" of our urban and media
environment. By turning Joe Camel in Joe Chemo and the “Hit” of
the “New Exxon” in the <a
href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/24301298@N08/2299349480/">“Shit”
of the Exxon Valdez disaster</a> they were also exposing the
kind of information corporations spend so much money on to
greenwash.<em> </em>Contemporary culture jammers can limit
themselves to return this information where it belongs.</p>
<p><span id="more-605"></span></p>
<p>In my work, I use the term “disowning-function” to describe the
decoupling of property and propriety, matters of ownership and
matters of reputation. As Mark Rose has shown, modern bourgeois
authorship was able to conflate property and propriety by
suggesting that authors should be economically rewarded for what
society (identified here with the marketplace) considers
appropriate. If today such a conception has been naturalized,
Rose notes how until the early modern period the author was
considered a disinterested gentleman whose writings, knowledge
and scientific findings were considered honorable precisely
because un<em></em>tainted by personal interest. With the
introduction of modern copyright law, the opposite becomes true
as ownership and reputation, royalties and fame, are conflated
and tend to find their identity in the marketplace. (Simply put,
by market standards best-selling authors enjoy a higher
reputation than non-best-selling authors).</p>
<p>My argument is that the disowning-function is a crack in the
author-function that becomes visible when what is proper appears
as inappropriate and vice versa. For instance, Hollywood film
directors have shared the pseudonym <a title="Alan Smithee at
IMDB.com" href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000647/"
target="_blank">Allen Smithee</a> (or Alan Smithee) for over
three decades to disown films re-cut by a film production
against their will. In this way, Alan Smithee allowed directors
to formally honor their contract while working <em>outside of
their reputation</em>. More recently, the Catalan art-activist
collective YoMango! has shown that shoplifting from corporate
chain stores can be a creative, edgy, controversial, and
therefore reputable activity (at least within the language-game
of the contemporary art world).</p>
<p>In the case of the KC intervention, re-pasting a tweet on a
store window is a simple gesture of returning what has been
quickly disowned to its referent. No matter how hard Cole tries
to disown his (trademarked) speech, Twitter's persistence
creates a record that is available to millions of users, who can
appropriate it, without even having the need of altering it.
Through a simple recontextualization, the ready-made decal
reminds the designer himself that what he said really belongs to
him as any other tweet, any other marketing campaign. On the
other hand, it reminds us that there is a limit to the more or
less calculated cynicism of marketing campaigns, the
obliteration of the actual suffering and courage of millions of
people, the endless play of simulacra. In other words, this
cynical game is not only proper to <em>a</em> Kenneth Cole but
reveals a culture–namely, how far brands can go in order to grab
more eyeballs. Obviously, KC’s apology bespeaks how worried he
must be for the negative impact this PR Waterloo may have on his
brand. And yet this incident is also one of those powerful
moments of truth in which the conflation of property and
propriety, trademarked speech and the viral societal penetration
of this speech, creates a backlash through which it is possible
to glimpse at an effective cultural politics--a culture jamming
that is native to the new information environment in which it
operates.</p>
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