Signs of Empire:

Rhetoric in the Globalization Debate

Nathan Schulman

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“So that the signs of misery not be doubled by the misery of signs.”

~ Ne pas plier

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Abstract

This extended research essay will look into the Globalization debate and the particular role visual

communication plays in its rhetoric. It will provide a close reading of the significations through

which the voices of Anti-globalization protest have spoken and are speaking. Through a broad

approach to the construction of signs and their basis, it will look at evidence from the topic’s on-

going political-ideological discourse, both advertising from the top and subvertising from below.

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where we begin

From Ads to Advocacy

where we stand

Autonomy and Alternatives

McDonaldization: Would you like some Freedom Fries with that?

where we could do better

Puppetry of the Pent-Up

The Party by the People for the People?

A Minor Threat and a Mishap

The Pen Could Be Mightier

Cleaning Up Mao

Che = Kitsch

What’s Fair, Laid Bare

where we’ve been

A MayDay for May 68

So Swiss, So Clean

where we could go

Scala Scales The Fence

Globalize Democratic Graphic Design!

figures

notes & works cited

Table of Contents

Introduction

Realities

Criticism

Possibilities

01 - 05

06 - 11

12 - 17

18 - 21

22 - 25

26 - 28

29 - 32

33 - 39

4 0- 43

44 - 46

47 - 50

51 - 54

55 - 58

59 - 62

63- 82

83 - 93

Chris Wood's McDonald’s Nation.

Distressed typography also seeks to reclaim the streets.

Diesel's ‘ACTION! For Successful Living’ campaign.

Clothing As Rhetoric: The Black Bloc and their Jackets.

“Work In A Cubicle?”

What Fordism conceives, the Mustang relieves.

Bad signs are a bad sign.

Zapatista women and girls on guard.

Maoist Nepalese women on attack.

Cover of We Are Everywhere:

The Irresistible Rise of Global Anti-Capitalism.

Subcomandante Marcos, left.

Urban Outfitters cap, right.

The mysterious Marcos:

behind the mask, those fiery eyes.

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Figures

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Figures

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12.2

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17.1

17.2

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Poster for The Fourth World War.

Original Photograph for The Fourth World War Poster.

Baby speak.

Rebel! Tie and all!

El Lissitzky’s Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge.

Russia's Red Square meets the Vegas Red Square.

Che: a symbol’s slippery slope. Part 1.

Che: a symbol’s slippery slope. Part 2.

Psychedelic Rock poster from San Francisco, left.

Noise Rock poster from Seripop, right.

*

Where We Begin

From Ads to Advocacy

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As our world moves ever more towards connections and unification, it finds itself on a path of

discovery. Embedded, largely invisible, this unfolding process, the one of Globalization, finds

products and those who produce them standing increasingly on new ground. The resulting global

marketplace, above and beyond economic function, affects a continuing shift in our global mindset.

It raises questions about the necessities of our pursuits and how we seek fulfillment. In turn, it forces

us to re-evaluate our vision of ourselves. Trying to grasp what we could be, we attempt to evaluate

the language both directed at and adapted by us. As more and more will fill the marketplace and

become that very market it fills, so too will advertising more and more fill the contemporary mental

environment. Wading through so many codes of another’s, we help to define both those codes and

ourselves. We fast become a sort of culmination of culminations. Just as the Market pushes for

economic integration through world development, the Market pushes for self development through

Advertising. If seeing is believing, what, then, are we being told to believe, and how?

Grammar, according to semiotician M.A.K Halliday, “is a means of representing patterns of

experience,” and “enables human beings to build a mental picture of reality, to make sense of their

experience of what goes on around them and inside them” (101). In any realm of visual grammar on

a grand scale, there are a few main drives of production. One is telling to tell; another, telling to sell.

Within these differences remains several intents, both communicative- the aesthetic and the political.

Acting as intermediaries for others, professional graphic designers straddle the line between the two,

adding their artistic and technical expertise for the benefit of another’s message. In political groups,

that which is visually manifested is often done so by, and for the stricter use of, that community

within the movement. To gain new perspectives on language, particularly our own, we must look at

other languages, particularly the visual.

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“When you name yourself, you always name another.

When you name another, you always name yourself.”

~ Bertolt Brecht

How can we take command of our consciousness, becoming agents as much as subjects? We start

by realizing all messages must be discerned and how we construct them says as much about us as

the message itself. As Walter Benjamin did once remind us, “at any moment the reader is ready

to turn into a writer” (232). Visual language is culturally specific and not universally understood.

Successful visual communication depends on successful decoding. Not all audiences will be able

to effectively partake in this decoding because the same things take on entirely different meanings

to different people. This means coding can never fully succeed, never entirely be accomplished,

because the thoughts behind that which is sent are never fully perceptible. A message’s passage

is based on what’s brought to the dialogue as well as by what the communicator devises to bring.

Forever this mysterious process, coding creates a conundrum for the visual communicator, but

should still rightfully seek an appropriate ends to its goals. In the Globalization debate, the ideals of

both free trade and visual rhetoric, even that which protests free trade, are the same – a fruitful and

meaningful exchange. But what of reality’s sometimes denigration of such ideals – what then?

If it is not uncommon today to feel as if we are reading someone else’s script, perhaps it is because

we are so conditioned to feeling conditioned. Fraught with considerations, Advertising has by now

existed long enough to be studied, loved and loathed. But what of the visual communication of

advocacy, the propagation of non-commercial ideas, how can we compare the two?

One could say that advertisements act to attract, most often enjoyably, by lulling us into the

process. Signs of dissent, on the other hand, are about, and exist through, intervention, through

destabilizing and re-wiring signs of the existent and powerful status quo. Usually not pleasant,

they're certainly not exotic. Both are forms of visual rhetoric, seeking to persuade through imaging.

However, while advertising is a fundamental part of the current economic system, the burgeoning

protests running counter to Globalization are a direct and fundamental challenge to that system.

The market but creates the function of advertising, while advertising performs a duty far beyond

economic. That duty is being “the main (but not the only) channel through which the culture-

ideology of consumerism is transmitted” (Sklair 132). Alas Advertising is rightly seen as a ‘hidden

persuader,’ its true effects and meaning somewhere beneath the surface.1 As Guy Debord put it,

in the spectacle of advertising, incapable of being questioned, “what appears is good, what is good

appears” (“Society of the Spectacle” 12). When advertising reconstructs, it goes on to describe this

reconstruction as necessary. Advertising and Mass Media thus permeate just as they perpetuate.

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Protest, meanwhile, is more decentralized, having no main conduit of its culture-ideology. While

still seeking to be anything but invisible, Protest doesn’t usually become as apparent as advertising,

or in as uniform a fashion. It pins its hopes instead on eventual change through active, but limited

confrontation. Both Advertising and Protest are taken to mean very different things as they are

politically understood, and both, too, are forms of mobilization. With ads, though, the goal is more

singular, more pronounced - someone else’s selling leads to you buying.

In the age of post-scarcity, moreover, we buy as we sell ourself on the buying. Through this act

of purchasing, a country’s citizen becomes a ‘consumer-citizen,’ one whose acts have political

implications far beyond the cash register. The well-fed system this creates does more than just

profit. Among its larger effects is the erosion of the nation-state, a decline which coincides with the

furthering of privatized free trade.

John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, once declared “those who own the

country ought to govern it” (“John Jay Quotes”). Post-9/11, President Bush suggested Americans

shoulder new responsibilities by fighting a “war on terrorism” and entering “the ownership society.”2

In the latter conception, our wealth, being the richest nation in the history of the world, inevitably

leads to shopping-as-patriotic duty. The head of state asking his citizens to help themselves through

the market, and not the state he presides over, represents a particular ideology well worth examining.

It indicates a strong faith that free trade works, that it works well, and that it works best left alone. In

that the Bush administration has explicit ties to the private sector, it may also speak to the collusion

of government and big business.3 To some, the war on terrorism has also “revealed the military

aspect of globalization: globalization’s invisible hand required an equally global iron fist” (Caffentzis).

Responding to this, Stanley Hauerwas, considered “America’s best theologian,” asked if the good

life was a life full of goods (Elshtain). Entering an increasingly common complaint, he boldly stated,

“On Sept. 11, Americans were confronted by people ready to die as an expression of their profound

moral commitments. Their willingness to die stands in stark contrast to a politics that asks of its

members in response to Sept. 11 to shop” (O’Neill). Though his questions weren’t particularly new,

their context most certainly was. The intensification of global finance has also intensified our desire

to question and understand that system’s fundamentals, a desire which inevitably overlaps into

the visual. If against the Debordian spectacle, the crowding of unmediated life with that of mass

mediation, we ask what the role of visual rhetoric is, and what it could be.

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If History is said to be a marriage between image and meaning then social conditions shape both

those images and those meanings. As critic Jeffery Keedy puts it, “history is written by and for the

winners” (43). Our identity as American citizens and consumers is a powerful shaper of our global

politics and thus who we are as both designers and retrievers in this small, globalizing world. Our

specialized position in visual communication allows for a wide variety of clients and abundance of

messages and intent. When we help construct representations of other identities, we help define

both ourselves and a wider spectrum. We take well to such prospects when we broach a broader

understanding of the communicative goals of those around us, both with whom we agree and with

whom we do not.

John Berger once wrote that “Democracy was born of the principle of conscience. Not, as the

free market would have us believe, from the principle of choice which- if it is a principle at all-is a

relatively trivial one” (Howard 34). If we can open up our brains to open up our wallets, we should

be willing to do the same as the cost of our lifestyle, as part of a renewed responsibility towards this

Democratic principle of conscience.

And just as Marxism has led to historicizing our understanding of signifying practices, there is

likewise a need today to historicize the practices of meaning production within the rubric of ‘Anti-

globalization.’ As something we’ve never seen the likes of, hardly are we to make out the movement

just yet. It questions, more than answers, and has a desire for the imperceptible. But that the jury's

still out just means we need to push on all the more. Both old and ongoing processes do effect us

rather we see them or not.

The French like to say, “L’histoire ne repasse pas lets plats,” which means, “History doesn’t offer

second helpings” (George). We most certainly have enough on our plates today. We tread through

the barrage of contemporary life, overload upon overload. But just because no one human can

see the transnational flow of capital in a day doesn’t mean it doesn’t flow. Globalization and its

counter movements are going on right now, not in retrospect. We need to become informed and

make decisions now if we are going to make them at all. Will it take another few decades before we

historicize these images, debating their referents after its too late?

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*

Where We Stand

Autonomy and Alternatives

6

If historian Eric Hobsbawn’s “short 20th century” of 1914 until the collapse of the Soviet Union

can be called the “Age of Extremes,” then our current age will surely be seen in the future as one of

encroaching extreme capitalism.4 Globalization may be one of the most hotly contested and partisan

topics of our day, but the process of Capitalist integration has been going on for decades. No less

than Marx and Engels foresaw it in their Communist Manifesto, predicting, “The need of a constantly

expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It

must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.” Hobsbawn himself

writes, “The world described by Marx and Engels in 1848 in passages of dark, laconic eloquence, is

recognizably the world we live in 150 years later” (Hobsbawm 16). The survival of capitalism itself

depends on the survival of contemporary Globalization. Millennial capitalism may be mutable and

multi-faceted, but it also flows from a self-perpetuating late Nineties market populism. According

to Thomas Frank, idolatry of the Marketplace has been “part of the cultural wallpaper for years.”

Thoughts can’t be measured, but as critical pedagogist Henry Giroux continues, “To paraphrase Fred

Jameson, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of neoliberal capitalism.”5

The emergence of the Anti-globalization movement, then, represents something of a newer plane

in Progressive Political movements, particularly in the US. The last decade has born some of the

largest shifts in outlook over contemporary financial and cultural integration. Epochal moments have

been frequent. First there was January 1, 1994, the date NAFTA went into effect and the Zapatistas

began their uprising. The lesser known East Asian financial and economic crisis followed in the latter

half of 1997. The key turning point came with the well-publicized “Battle of Seattle,” which followed

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“

“

There is no alternative.”

~ Margaret Thatcher

Another world is possible.”

~ World Social Forum motto; Movement of Movements rallying cry

in November 1999. And then, after irrevocably changing America, the events which followed

September 11, 2001 and America’s subsequent wars with Afghanistan and Iraq led to a new discourse

about military globalization. Most recently, on July 28 of this year, 2005, CAFTA passed narrowly by

a 217-215 vote. These events provide ample merit to the belief that Globalization is not only facing an

ideological crisis but that this crisis has already reached its boiling point.

The never-ending quest to shape trade here and abroad has multifaceted and opposing roots. Its

heritage is a feisty one, laissez-faire free trade battling it out with Protectionism. The new debate

is different though, and never so clear cut as a rational Globalism versus an irrational Tribalism.

Contradictions arise, and often. Many bemoan a disintegrating liberal Internationalism as an

underlying basis for the Anti-globalization protests and their importance. As Doug Henwood of Left

Business Observer has written, “Since the heavily advertised death of socialism, if there’s an idea that

unites much leftish economic thought today, it’s that globalization is the root of many evils. It’s a

strangely amorphous enemy, one at odds with the usual progressive celebration of diversity, and an

interesting shift for a tradition that was once deeply cosmopolitan.” In actuality, while globalization

is a process which has led to unprecedented polarization, it also offers new types of Internationalist

unifications.

In this age of appropriations and complexities, redefinitions are common. Like so many artistic

movements, political movements often grapple with the problem of naming themselves. It is critics,

not necessarily those involved, who most often give the multifaceted simplified flair. Many groups,

such as the infamous Situationist International, are strongly offended by the names and -isms used

to define them. While framing can freeze fluidity into dogma, the convoluted is almost bound to be

categorized eventually. With this in mind I ask the reader to consider the following. Although I would

certainly not call Anti-globalization protesters “The Coalition to Keep Poor People Poor,” as Thomas

Friedman has, the term Anti-globalization is regarded as a demeaning epithet by many within or

sympathetic to the movement.6 Not surprisingly, eminent political scholars have much to say about

this. Asked by Danilo Mandic about the phrase “Anti-globalization movement,” in an interview

with Princeton University’s ‘Only Anti-Corporate Publication’ Dollars & Sins, prominent dissenter

Noam Chomsky called it “just plain propaganda.” The protesters, he continued, “aren’t opposed to

globalization. They’re just calling for other modes of globalization that prioritize rights of people,

future generations, the environment, etc., more than the rights of those with concentrated wealth and

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power” (Mandic). Authors of Empire and Multitude, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have also said,

“Anti-globalization is not an adequate characterization of the protesters in Genoa—or Gothenburg,

Quebec, Prague, or Seattle. The protesters are united against the present form of capitalist

globalization, but the vast majority are not against globalizing currents and forces as such. This

should not be called an Anti-globalization movement. It is an alternative globalization movement”

(Hardt and Negri).7 Robert Wright from Slate finishes this line of thought with “these days hardly

anyone accepts the label Anti-globalization,” simply because, “most leftists now grant that you can’t

stop the globalization juggernaut; the best you can do is guide it.” Other naming terms are bandied

about but never really stick. These include the ‘Fair Trade’ movement, the ‘Social Justice’ movement,

and less frequently and more radically, the ‘Anti-Capitalism’ movement. What are some reasons

the other names subside? ‘Fair Trade’ is a specific economic principle, and perhaps too financial for

citizens prone to leave talk of trade up to economists. ‘Social Justice’ is as an evocative name with

firm feeling - seemingly one of the strongest the movement could use. An accessible concept, it flows

from the minds of even the most powerful, as it did when the former Pope John Paul II said “There

is no authentic and stable democracy without social justice.” Aligning oneself against aid to the

weak, however ill defined, is hard if not impossible to do. Despite being these things, ‘Social Justice’

still remains rather undefinable. As an appeal, its vagueness is both its strength and weakness.

Under its banner, any number of things could be left in or taken out. These differing names and the

movements they represent one and all exist just as they also overlap and don’t necessarily agree with

one other. Above all, the movements exist and excite as Populist. The ‘Movement of Movements’

would seem to be the most accurate and full-fledged categorizer.

The beliefs and expectations of these movements are just as numerous as the manners in

which they are defined. An older economic and cultural Nationalism is now most prominently

being replaced by a newer Communitarianism. Most essentially, the protesters wish to rethink the

existing economic paradigm. They are anti-autocratic and anti-plutocracy but not necessarily anti-

authoritarian. Some dissenters are anti-corporate. Corporations, they like to point out, do not raise

taxes. They are not governments and shouldn’t act like them. Others are anti-Americanization,

or against Western behemoth power as a whole. The more extreme of the spectrum can be anti-

technology, of the feral anarcho-primitivist leaning, or simply the violent anarchist groups called the

Black Blocs.

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What all these groups may lack in exact goals, they share in general spirit. They hope one and

all to break down walls of guarded information or beliefs, and create a quicker reacting dissent and

proactive presence. They wish too for protection, from corruption, from having their right to speak

silenced, from being forgotten. To preserve cultural integrity at all costs is their new hope. This hope

comes from the belief that, in the age of interconnectivity, the indigenous have the explicit right to

claim for themselves self-determination and autonomy within a system they cannot claim as their

own.

In hoping there are some values too elusive for the market’s grasp, we see strands of some ill

defined simple life. If mass media communication indicates artificiality, the desire to go back to

somewhere innate makes logical sense. About the word ‘sustainability’ itself, Chris Riley writes

“within the semantics of the word is the resolution of a paradox: it is about keeping what we have,

not losing it” (71). In this view, it is surprising that conservatism and sustainability are not linked

more frequently. Both fear change, and seek to ‘preserve.’ This helps to explain the Anti-globalization

connection between the Left and the Right, and how it was said the hippies and hard-hats came

together at last in Seattle. This traditionalism, coming from the left of left, is actually conservative in

nature, but conservative of minority, not majority, differences and interests. It may then appear that

there are tentative connections to collectivism, but hardly as a root, for right wing Protectionism of

the Buchanan sort is far removed from a love of socialism but rather its opposite. For another thing,

outside of the Kibbutzem in Israel, much collectivism of this century was forced and could hardly be

called natural.8

Of essential importance to all these protesting projects is building a critical public. This goal

of creating an information-rich environment envisions one in which the powerful cannot hide

from accountability. While more and more this dream becomes reality, upon the framework being

established, we find in its openness as many opinions as facts. Some want the state to wither, others

for it to take socialist control. What is disturbing to the one is reassuring to another. “At one extreme,

globalization is seen as an irresistible and benign force for delivering economic prosperity to people

throughout the world. At the other, it is blamed as a source of all contemporary ills” (International

Labour Office 24). Put another way, “According to market populists, people can only act freely and

rationally in a free market; thus, anticorporate activists are really Stalinoid puppets, duped by leftist

rhetoric. Furthermore, the globalization of the free market is inevitable, and resistance is the work of

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flat-earthers and fools” (Great Books Foundation). Whilst the counter-hegemonic side bows close to

apocalyptic, the neoliberal side leans downright Panglossian. Where the one side sees a harvest, the

other sees a blight.

Can we escape such false dilemmas? In the past, expressions of the less powerful have been “lost

in the profusion of other messages that bombarded the population daily” (Rutherford 173). What does

this say about hope, about the future?

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*

Where We Stand

McDonaldization: Would you like some Freedom Fries with that?

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All around, in a quiet which lessens, the world is wondering. We are wondering about our direction,

and beginning to ask serious questions. What's the true effect of our corporate lifestyle? Are we

making idols of that which comforts us? While the phenomenon is global, the answers it delivers

are not. As Global Transnational Corporations (TNCs) largely reside in America, so too does the cult

of celebrity. It makes a certain sense to laud a type of celebrity criticism on a TNC. A Nike, being

American, will get the brunt of protest. An Adidas, while mightily similar, will not, simply because,

although multinational, it is German. As fast as everything becomes homogenized, it might seem the

lines of blame should become as mixed as all else. But the pendulum of argument pushes even still

towards one country. Cutting to any global root predicates a trip towards America assuredly, but also,

more than possibly, towards an American colonialism anew.

Just recently, McDonaldization: The Reader was unveiled. Has even fast food, that most banal object

of our daily affection, received the scholarly treatment? Not quite. ‘McDonaldization,’ in fact, appears

now as a sociological term, and one which holds promise. As more than a critique of the health

benefits of Big Macs, the term is a viable, newer subset of the more established Cultural Imperialism

argument. How did this happen, and why? First off, it's the company’s successful brand presence

that makes the term so popular, not its food, despite is popularity. Even under severe criticism, we

cannot displace the mental overload of assumptions that the McDonald’s brand has both blessed

and cursed us with. Burgers are burgers, meat is meat, but McDonald's is Americana itself, Apple

Pie straight from the oven. ‘Burger King-ization’ just wouldn’t connect for the same reason Burger

King, outside of any prized attributes in the real product itself, is the least successful brand, least

13

“

“

i’m lovin’ it.”

~ Branding slogan for the McDonald’s Corporation’s first global advertising campaign

The American night shall fall over the earth.”

~ Charles Baudelaire

successfully propagated. Is it any wonder that Super Size Me focused on not just any fast food joint,

but McDonald’s? Or that Fast Food Nation did as well? We're seeing a continuation of brand-as-

lifestyle, only this time used by social scientists in their critique, not marketers in their market. The

power of appearances in consumer driven rhetoric permeates through these brands, but not all

queries go unspoken.

As American lifestyle becomes increasingly branded, some of us, in fact, have become downright

concerned. If we're now studying Micky Dees's, even mocking it as we are, it is because we now

realize our addiction to some degree. As seen in Figure 1, a painting by Chris Wood calls itself

and our country a McDonald’s Nation. The work hopes to inform us of “The cult we’re in,” the

one we’re ever reluctant to decode. Afterall, no one likes to believe they’re in a cult. It aggravates

absolutely. Wood’s piece depicts two employees of McDonald’s giving a dedicated hand-over-heart

pledge like the good ol' duty of good ol' Americans. As a great deal of Americans have in fact

worked at McDonald’s at one time or another, the employees stand for more than themselves. They

stand for any and all, the everyman and everywoman. Their stance and uniforms is so bold and

perfect they almost resemble strange troops of consumerism at an important inaugural, saluting

not just our states, but our current state overall. As satire, the painting is casually heartbreaking

in its depiction of the too-common American allegiances between religion as fundamentalism,

shopping as excess, and capitalism as permanence. Conceptually executed this way, the painting

was lucky to carry an Adbusters cover as a showcase. Connecting the mega powers of America and

McDonald’s, as both the painting and term McDonaldization imply, seems apt if a disruption of the

Global System status-quo is sought. Yet inversely, when just one or two Gap billboards are culture

jammed, in a way promoted by an Adbusters within its pages, but for outside of them, do we see

this as effective monkey wrenching, alternative globalization on a positive scale, or just a prank on

that particular company, that particular billboard? Global Anti-Americanism has been prevalent long

before Iraq, but anti-Americanization and anti-Corporatism is a bit newer. Bush's failures at global

PR notwithstanding, the jamming of the imperialistic seems today too fashionable and perhaps

simplistic for sparking the kind of debate it seeks.

What of other acts of representational resistance? We see from France a full load of examples.

Here lies a country with varying tangents each hoping to stand apart from accepted Globalization

notions, and all connecting to an ode of a lifestyle alternative to its overreaching dictations. The ‘slow

14

food movement’ comes to us from France for these reasons, and that “French Women Don’t Get Fat”

wasn’t an instantly ridiculous book title also tells us of their prejudice.9 When French firebrand José

Bové took the radical chance of plowing into a McDonald’s, the symbolism couldn’t have been clearer.

“Farming was beginning to be the symbol of the resistance against globalisation,” Bové, a farmer and

the figurehead of the Peasant Confederation, said. The French have even turned Bové into a kind of

folk hero, a protector of their particularly nationalistic terroir.

Precisely for these inflating tendencies, the French-American discord was in the making long

before the Iraq War spats. Hence, in another representational act, one of resistance to encroaching

resistance, legislators in Washington (in session, no less), renamed our McDonald’s-driven eating

past time “Freedom Fries.”10 What pranksters! First hearing the news, we could be forgiven for

asking - this is a protest!? Salty goodness aside, we must admit we still eat fries and other unhealthy

food too much. Those same legislators certainly didn't take a stand on obesity, wouldn't take a stand,

not one on supporting fresh and local food, and not one on the violence of factory farms. Those

words would too upset, too much straighten our reclining chairs. Publicity stunt that it was, freedom

fries proved Anti-globalization was emerging in a more day-to-day way, a way in which its growth was

shown by how grating it was becoming, and therefore how much it was a force to be reckoned with,

logically or not. Perhaps, though, the freedom fries action was also a miscalculation of a theory not

really so unfounded. In his recent book Anti-Americanism, a less radical Frenchmen, Jean Francois

Revel suggested his fellow Europeans “project our faults onto America so as to absolve ourselves”

(Revel). The USA-as-Globalization-itself is itself an image, and one more and more projected. Those

who seek to challenge Globalization feel they are owed something, and very often they are. But this

doesn’t make them any less incapable of overly scapegoating, projecting as much as possible on

the WTO and IMF. If corporate interests, which are primarily American, shall be taken seriously

as unaccountable threats to democracy, which they well should be, governments worldwide should

be held accountable for bowing to these corporate interests, not simply America for producing the

interests to start with. Not all who are bullied are incapable of bullying back, or for disallowing the

bullying to begin in the first place.

Speaking of projecting faults, when author and Anti-globalization critic extraordinaire Naomi

Klein said “in a sense, globalisation is a re-branding of colonialism,” I wonder, for one, if she’s

giving too much power to the logos she says No to (Australian Broadcasting Corporation).11 Branding

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didn’t even exist until the late 1800’s, long after humans had created Imperialism and its subset of

Colonialism. Countries did indeed change the flags of those they conquered, effectively replacing

that most symbolic image of one culture with its conqueror. But the world’s first multinational

company, The Dutch East India Company, had a flag and yet didn’t advertise. Why not? Because

with all the colonial outposts it established, it didn’t need to. It imposed. Choice didn’t play a role. If

anything, the shopping aisles of modern society are choice itself manifest. Having an abundance of

capitalist choices doesn’t equate to a full fledged well-being by any means, but Naomi’s quote gets

awfully close to equating exported products with violence. She argues for people to have the power

to govern themselves, but not if that system, obviously capitalism and individual liberty, happens to

be one she disagrees with. It becomes an all too-simple argument of cooperation versus exploitation.

Miss Klein’s side of the argument might proceed like this: The forceful use of one person for the purpose

of another is, like slavery, a condition of control against that other’s will. Advertising is definitely a force,

and surely is forceful. It uses consumers against their will. I would then call globalization “a re-branding

of colonialism.” Arundhati Roy has said that debating the pros and cons of colonialism or imperialism is

“a bit like debating the pros and cons of rape.” Therefore, I would say globalization is a power we should

resist, simply because it is forced on us. And with what would Klein probably not end her argument

with, out of fear it would too offend? She would probably not say, though she wanted to, that,

following on Roy’s thinking, globalization-as-colonialism is really our own raping. Or, put another

way, consumers only accept consumer-society because they enjoy being raped. Though Naomi's

steered clear of illuminating such insults, it doesn't mean where she's headed is any less insulting.

Could we realistically call arranged marriages a system of slavery against choice? Its a compromise,

as is putting up with advertising. It doesn’t mean everything arranged for us, but by someone else,

is only for them, not us. It’s true that Governments wage war largely despite citizen choice, not

because of it. That doesn’t mean, love or otherwise, all marriages of convenience are inherently

ridiculous or evil. As a socialist scholar, Klein shouldn’t overlook a history in which an overriding

ideology of collectivism just took place of an overriding ideology of consumerist individualism. Both

stop questioning when enforced because both need to justify themselves away from any dissent.

There is more than branding and images involved in economic policy, and Klein should know

better. Sure, America manages a world stage by making it. But Mao stage-managed too. And what

would you call the personality cult of North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-il, or the beautiful nightmare

16

of that country's Mass Games, the “most elaborate human performance on earth”?12 Hollywood

provides showmanship of the grandest kind, but its not the only place of fables, and never has been.

Only touching on the Western spectacle is out of line. Socialist realism was choreographed too,

however elegantly. Is North Korea’s Juche any ‘realer’ than America’s Consumerism? Can a ‘false’

consciousness be instilled by the state? Herein lies the largest difficulty with McDonaldization. All of

us who are 'free' are implicated in what we produce, what we eat or do not, do or do not. McDonald’s

started small, by just one man. And now? Billions and billions served. However unhealthy, we didn’t

stand a chance. When given the opportunity to garner ‘good’ food, fast and cheap, without even

leaving car culture, we leaped. At the beginning, it must have seemed so revolutionary. But now,

when McDonald’s introduces a salad but not a healthy lifestyle, well then, that’ll do. And therein lies

the kicker – it’s not just us anymore. Will what's good enough for us Americans be good enough for

the rest of the world?

17

*

Where We Could Do Better

Puppetry of the Pent-Up

18

If protests are largely symbolic actions, lacking in concrete action, are the symbols they're immersed

in somehow dead, propositions of the potential, but never definites? At the least, does the multitude

of symbols need livening up? Could it be this animation comes in the form of not placards, but,

ironically enough, a seperate inaminate object, another one, more unique? The same questions can't

help but provide the same answers, so attempting new realms of dialogues seems worthy. But the

object I speak of - dare it need be so silly a thing? Dare it be... puppets?

Outside of Being John Malkovich or the equally surreal Czech avant-garde animation of Jan

Svankmajer or the Brothers Quay, puppetry gets a mighty short shrift in contemporary culture. If

anything at all, puppets are seen as creatures of fancy, to be ridiculed and put aside. If ever there was

an artistic activity least likely to achieve widespread respect and popularity, it would be puppetry. Why

then, within the movement of movements, are we seeing the creation of an entirely new sideshow,

the direct-action carnival? Why the carnival atmosphere? The street festivals, and indeed, the

puppets? Let’s dig a little deeper.

Theoretically, the carnival of Anti-globalization protest relates to using one spectacle to make light

of another - the other, broader one we are proposed to be involved in already. That which is creatively

chaotic, be it as obscene as Earth First! puke-ins at the mall, or as pleasing as street performers,

functions as a white noise, penetrating the preimposed with spontaneity. The carnival-like “provides

a conceptual space where marginalized voices can theorize about the possibilities of resistance”

(Brown and Stevens 12). Inherently antiauthoritarian, a carnival-esque world seems to be the one

which Anti-globalization protestors are largely seeking. The decisions behind open acts of frolic,

open to the public, also have a built-in distinguishing feature, although one that may well be lost in

translation. They illuminate, in reverse fashion, the closed door decision-making power of the world's

19

“To work for delight and authentic festivity is barely distinguishable

from preparing for general insurrection.”

~ Raoul Vaneigem

leading financial institutions, whose meetings and decisions affect the public in discernible ways they

won't see until later. Even still, many wouldn't read so far into such acts, just as a sober walker avoids

an encroaching drunk crowd. Particular explanations of the merits of such a system (and revelry is

still a system) are given rarely, if at all, and certainly not at the time. So Neoliberalism's defiance is

putting a sofa in the road, street art on a telephone wire, flowers on a city roof? All good and fine, but

are these really radical in the true sense of the word? Cutting to the root requires making light of the

root, true, but there have to be nutrients, such as financial institutions, for the root to begin growing.

I'm not sure a sofa where it shouldn't be is more than a detour, however well intentioned. It's

certainly not new business opportunities for the poor. While optimism and solidarity are to be valued

as rallying forces, if these groups are partaking in such actions for strictly such reasons it wouldn't

appear so. 'Radical self-reliance' without societal input is a dead end- simply code for the next aimless

communes, the next Burning Man.

When Emma Goldman proclaimed, “If I can’t dance I don’t want to be in your revolution,” she

had no clue what future fireworks she was setting off. Emma's quote did more than equate political

action with fun, it belittled the more traditional stance of change as slow and stodgy. Since revolution

is such hard work, daunting by definition, this new idea was to inject fun all you could. While these

intentions may have been clear, where we were heading was not. When the ‘Battle’ of Seattle is called

the ‘coming-out party’ of anti-capitalism and global justice worldwide, I wonder, which is it? A battle

or a party? Can it be both? I’m not so sure. Like the burlesque and dance parties that greeted the

2004 Republican National Convention in New York City, protesters more and more seek to humor

themselves, consequences of communication be damned. Are our days of action becoming nights of

dancing? If yes, is the connection between the two particularly clear-cut? Pleasure may be politically

useful in thats its personal, but pleasure’s real usefulness comes in seeking out more pleasure,

whether it involves freeing people or restraining them. Pleasure is a wonderful thing, but pleasure

for pleasure’s sake doesn’t ask questions of itself anymore than dictators do. If all this partying is

more of a retreat then it thinks it is (and I imagine the line of thinking goes- if they own us, at least

let’s have what fun we can), how is this retreat different from the never-ending party of Me, Me, Me

which we call unchecked consumerism? Protest, seen as liberatory, finds itself believing all acts of

deviance are defiance, all acts of insular entertainment widespread social comment. Is this new? In

The French and Their Revolution, historian Richard Cobb teaches us that “partial drunkenness was

20

often an important component in a certain type of revolutionary excitability, particularly in meetings

or committees.” This is fine in itself. What is not is the promotion of one type of life as the only.

Puppets may be spirited, and definitely are creative, but they're going to need to do a little more than

provide a false alternative. Just as I'm sure artisans love making these puppets, I’m sure artists in Los

Angeles only think the Venice Beach Boardwalk is ‘real,’ regardless of the fact alternative stagecraft is

stagecraft all the while. Like it not, advertising and its correlatives makes up much of popular culture.

Saying a carnival is realer than real is just a strange sort of personality warfare, a nicer way of telling

Pop Culture I hate what you are, because I'm so much better. Television may not be ‘real’ but all

those hours make it strangely integral to us. Sorry Mr. Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Take Place,

despite its televised theatre. This isn't a great development, and surely lacking. But does that give one

group the right to say their real is more real than all the others?

21

*

Where We Could Do Better

The Party by the People for the People?

22

The capitalism of today lets us know it’s not perfect. It acknowledges its flaws outright, yet merely

enough, casually, not essentially. Tongue-in-cheek, it is Diesel telling us to Drink Our Urine as the

fountain of youth, then creating fictional activist campaigns to literally capitalize on protest chic. In

making fun of themselves, advertising and capitalism don’t necessarily seek out corrections. They

don't need to. When asked to put up with this development, we're left with little choice. We don't

demand change when we don't sense we can.

Yet if the best things in life really are free, outside of easy exchange, why do we need money-

driven ads to tell us as much? Can we not find space for enjoyment on our terms, instead of having it

handed down to us from the top? Compromise may be just as necessary as consumption, of course,

and just as freedom is not free, neither is lunch. But how we were put here is part of a larger strategy,

one sadly brilliant and surely unnecessary.

However ill-defined, if these best 'things' I speak of, our free ones, belong to us, where else might

this take us? What else might some wish to claim as their own? How about something so simple yet

enormous it goes undetected - 'outside'? As the philosopher and social theorist Henri Lefèbvre put it,

“There is a politics of space because space is political” (59).The direct-action affinity group 'Reclaim

The Streets' seeks just this politicization of the public sphere. Blockading a street area in the daytime,

the group will set up within it, quickly and illegally, areas for music, dancing and more- creating, in

effect, a renegade street festival. Ironically, “There will be dancing in the streets,” was chosen recently

as one of the slogans for the 2012 NYC Olympics bid. No less than the world renown Ogilvy Brand

Integration Group conceived and orchestrated the tagline. And yet, these joyous words of incitement,

seen all around the city, failed to incite their suggestion. With all the bureaucracy and red tape of a

proposed Olympics, a true party was asssuredly not what they had in mind. Celebrations by and for

the people can only be promoted so much. Celebrity sponsors have to come on board first, vendor

23

“This effectively is an anarchists’ travelling circus.”

~ Tony Blair

booth merchandise worked out well in advance. But "Politics is in the streets" was a slogan of May

'68 Paris and in comparison the two phrases have little in common as far as what they affected.

Surely dancing isn't political, is it?

'Reclaim The Streets' says yes, it can be. Seeking to circumvent capitalist underpinnings of public

space and the activities within it, the group evaluates what is allowed and what is not. Spontaneity is

encouraged in and of itself simply to fight the monotony of rules. Irrational exuberance rules the day.

These 'Reclaim' disobedients certainly like their fun and know how to have it. When entertainment

is this revolutionary, the 'protestival' is born. The real question becomes at what cost to outside

communication? And does all this make the protests more accessible, or does it in some way nullify

the subject’s seriousness?

Naming conventions are always good for a first look. The ‘Reclaim’ in ‘Reclaim The Streets’ seeks

for a far ago, long before the usurption of the commons. What it likely really bemoans is the failures

of ’68. As in that year’s street ‘parties,’ these new ones also hope for a “reclaimed public space as

a locus of cultural creation and political action” (Molins 9). Agitprop from London’s Reclaim the

Streets further clarifies their purpose, asserting- “we believe in this as a broader principle, taking back

those things which have been enclosed within capitalist circulation and returning them to collective

use as a commons” (Notes from Nowhere 54). OK, OK, so Capitalism entails private property to

such a degree the two are linked together. And so the road to Capitalism was the road to roads. And

cars privatize and separate. But aren’t roads amoral? Highways take the sick to the hospital, but

also provide avenues for drug trafficking. Would we call such a thing as the highway either good

or evil? Movements of some kinds quell and hurt, movements of others assist and buildup. That

Globalization is a process which does both may well be because its a highway whose morality hinges

on its drivers.

While reclaiming is inherently about entitlement, its also very explicity driven by fear. To fear

an enclosing of biological and intellectual commons is one thing, but to fear an enclosing of all

commons all together is quite another. Only if you're afraid the latter has already happened will

you react ever strongly. Renown environmentalist Vandana Shiva’s research program Navdanya

did the first, casual bit soundly when it stated, “We reject the idea of private property on life forms

and knowledge” (Navdanya.org). Delineating slightly in words yet tellingly in meaning, the former

President of the National Audubon Society Peter Berle countered Navdanya with his totalizing

24

remark, “We reject the idea of private property” (Marquardt). Many Americans don't want their

culture forced into privatization any more than they want it forced into their own keeping. Many

as well couldn't be further apart from Berle’s belief. With his imperative of Socialist sacrifice laid

so bare, its no wonder the mainstream’s views on environmental views would be chided, seen

as an almost insurmountable obstacle and therefore cause for a radical reordering of human

consciousness. How much farther can this line of thinking really go? Sooner of later, you’re not

only speaking of Proudhon’s "Property is Theft!," but the words become theory, and the theory your

personal mantra.13 And, if, as an Anarchist, you don’t believe in property, why not destroy it? If, as

an Anarchist, you believe the world is collapsing, why bother to build it up? Born-again Anarcho-

Primitives may be telling us to live in simple poverty but this doesn’t sound like rational voices of

the poor from the past anymore than it does of the poor from the present. These beliefs may be just

as cynical as calling foreign aid evil because that aid comes only from those who will also somehow

benefit from it. These more desperate, Blac Bloc-ian ideas are not just marginalized for the fun of it.

Their positive intents are outweighed by practical extremity. We're in equal amounts of trouble when

we have too little or too much.

Either way you look at it, 'Reclaim the Streets' is already being turned away from itself, essentially

a sign its fame is taking off, or a voucher for future renown. In music, the band name ‘Bloc Party’

has adeptly taken the Street Block Party concept and added a dash of unprovoked radicalism with the

spelling of ‘Bloc’ it subtly gets from the Black ‘Bloc’ spelling. Information about such etymology can

either be pushed forward or left out. It all depends on what the market will respond to, regardless of

how complicit that audience may be in the process.

Graphic design reclaims the street too. As seen in Figure 2, it does so largely through distressed

typography, which speaks not just to Urban street culture, but has very political ramifications as

well. The 'street' has always been a place all its own, and one of political value. That the texture of

gravel, pavement, town, city and earth shows itself through the texture of letters is both inherently

predictable and correct in political graphics. The broadness of policy, of us, can only be represented

in a manner of ways, typically reduced for clarity. Our natural environment is as real as real gets, yet

still open to broad enough interpretation. Since it surrounds everything and also exists and fills our

perceptions, it works well as a representational space for agitation and questioning.

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*

Where We Could Do Better

A Minor Threat and a Mishap

26

In a time of multiplicity, one of masks, one’s radicalism may exist in one group but not another. It

may seem one could not be both salesperson for a multinational corporation in the day and admirer

of hardcore punk’s DIY ethics in the night. Yet very recently, an album cover for legendary Dischord

label punk band Minor Threat was subverted into an ad for world giant Nike. The designers who

essentially subverted and defused the language of an avowedly anti-Capitalist group of radicals may

have really enjoyed the band’s music, and may have, above plundering it for the production of ‘cool,’

even respected it. Nonetheless they inappropriately switched codes in an attempt to commodify a

potentially dangerous ethos towards the status quo by further padding that status quo with new layers

of branding cool. Nike got caught, of course, and had to apologize, but that skirts the issue. If Nike

can maneuver the media so well, why wouldn't they maneuver through the world of their activist

opponents? This sort of thing happens often, so why did this particular case surprise so?

Ironically, it is because it is the politicos themselves whom usually divert and re-codify persuasive

statements. When their side does it, popular culture is fair game. Divorcing itself into pastiche, it

has a certain power in its naming of Situationist ‘detournement,’ or Adbusters-powered ‘culture

jamming.’ When Nike, or I guess I’m oblidged to say, the 'bad guys,' do it, it’s heresy. What’s most

intriguing to me is the how in which each side seeks its own code collaging under its own context.

If mass marketing is the power-imbued official language of the free-trade propelled Democratic,

Capitalist, Western and particularly American side, I suppose it has an enemy in the anti-globalists

and anti-Americanizationists on the other side. But when American activists fly to Seattle to bemoan

technology, how much hate can there really be? Isn’t the Boho already becoming the Bobo?14

If culture jammers demark supranational branding, can we really expect future ads campaigns to

not then designify those counters, as Diesel did, in Figure 3, feigning protest chic in its ‘ACTION!

For Successful Living’ campaign? Lobby groups like Mongoven, Biscoe & Duchin are already leading

27

“Allegiance and critique are not incompatible – should not be incompatible.”

~ Max Bruinsma

a charge in PR-managed ‘NGO-Busting’ and ‘Anti-Activism.’15 Is it any wonder we’re beginning to

see a game of graphic design dirty tricks? This is politics, after all.

But what of these tricky tactics used by both sides? The concept of 'Culture jamming' flows not so

surprisingly from an earlier form of public inscription- graffiti. More specifically, we can trace it yet

again back to Paris, where both in May 1968 and the 1980's, stencil graffiti art exploded as a new

and very capable medium for political messaging. Like the Situationist concept of collage it follows

upon, also Parisian, ‘culture jamming’ can have unidentified sources and just as easily hide its

authors. It can build upon what is already laid out before it, but need not describe its process in doing

so. Isn’t this a cop out, just a non-Nike stealing their Minor Threat? Unlike Tags in Graffiti, which

are either about group identification or individualist ego, slogan graffiti needn’t ever be signed, and

in fact, rarely is. If all those who write ‘Never Work’ actually mean it, did every single one of them

steal their spraycans? They had to get them from somewhere. If we started weighing these things

strictly out of context, we’d make commitments irrationally on a regular basis. Unlike those majestic

lost novels, just one Salinger storage unit away, sometimes the author hides away because they're

too disreputable. Much the way sports fans carry signs of identification with the team they support

through wearing team uniforms, waving banners, and donning optimistic face paint, so too do the

members of a protest movement identify themselves and with others through visible signs. But if the

masses are to be involved is anonymity any sort of trait to rally behind?

The violent anarchist contigent Black Bloc uses close to identical clothing for such a protection and

confusion, as shown in Figure 4. Prone to non-context specific violence as they are, the Black Bloc

reduce the peaceful sit-ins of yesteryear to blotched memories. They attribute to violence a power they

should be opposing, and by averting press at all costs give it the right to over-characterize an entire

diversity of voices into the remnants of broken windows. As a start, the Black Bloc should be shunned

in the organizing of peaceful protests and dialogue creation. The violence of the Black Bloc need not,

as it does now, vilify the real heart of the movement. At least with the masking of the Ford ad seen

in Figure 5, I know more about the goals behind what's apparent. Ford alone advertises its cars, not

some military-industrial complex. That doesn’t mean there might not be vague connections, or that

I’ll like the system. It certainly won’t mean I’ll know everything about the ad's conception or even

very much about Ford at all. But at the least the message won’t reprimand me due to its own inability

to be coherent. You can’t call for corporations to be responsible and transparent if you aren’t yourself.

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*

Where We Could Do Better

The Pen Could Be Mightier

29

If the process of political sign making is removed from requiring graphic designers, the middlemen

of communication, why do so many banners remain naive in conception? The author of political

signs is not separated from the production process, as design critic Marshall's quote decries. Instead

it is those who conceive the content that also construct their form, a inverse reality to designer

Michael Rock's dream of the "designer as author."16 These authors-as-designers may have messages

to encode of the utmost importance, but their letters and white space don’t always illustrate the

point. Many seem hastily constructed, as if made moments before taking to the street. Indeed, in the

feature photo of this section, a protester was happily photographed making signs moments before

using them, many other signs strewn about beneath their newest counterparts. A Chinese proverb

claims "In haste, there is error," but what is the most common feature of these signs, outside of their

haste? It is handwriting.

Typographer Zuzana Licko’s famous creedo was “People read best what they read most.” Though

originally used as a justification in the legibility wars, it also applies here. Do we read back our nightly

journal writing every morning or do we read the newspaper? In the semiotic landscape of the age of

mass production, reproducible typography, not handwriting, is what rules the day. Perhaps this is

part of the strategy - using difference to claim difference. But if so, the ferocity of energy the protester

may feel in their spirited, ‘unplanned’ moment of construction will be just as intensely lost on a

questioning public hoping for rationalization. Communication should be clear and purposeful - if

it is not, it is mere expression. In the goals of signification, this expression is all the more harmful

if it is one of violence. Listening to the protesters can be difficult, even impossible, amongst the

vocal and visual noise of violent hooligans, whose tactics clearly create cognitive dissonance. If what

30

““Before Gutenberg, writers knew how to place letters and white space on a page.

With letterpress printing, the author was separated from the production process

which was entrusted to a growing number of specialists.”

~ Alan Marshall

the spectator senses out are the violent minorities at the front-lines, those senses and those alone

leave the viewer as puzzled as a layman seeking to uncover what they're really hearing in the chance

exercises of John Cage.

If we take the old Women’s Movement slogan “The Personal is Political” to mean that to fight the

personal effects of a non-personal system, messages of revolt should be personal, perhaps this also

stands for saying that resistance itself should be personalized. Simplifying a great deal, walking into

a coffee shop whose signs involve typography often means you’re in a chain, whereas old fashioned

handwritten signs usually imply an independent presence. Sloppy as the lettering may be, they are

meant to appear, if constructed to be much at all, homely, friendly, local. Type choices can never

really be friendly of course, anymore than can a sculpture. They won’t complement or hug you. Non-

physical and non-vocal, it is only our mental construction that facilitates such attributive powers.

Connotations, then, have a huge role in this, regardless of their actual origins. What some may see

in the use of handwriting in visual communicating as authenticity may to others seem undesigned,

detrimentally spontaneous or even childish. The reader reads their words as they may, but if protest

signs are largely handwritten, and have been, the connotation exists, and has existed for some time.

In harking to the past, this procedure appears immobile and unwilling to subside, riding the wave

rather than fighting it.

If the protest signs somehow believe that ‘local’ = handwritten and ‘global’ = Helvetica, they might

be going more on connotation than a logistical plan. Figure 6 shows just how many handwritten

placards are jumbled at best, completely incoherent at worst. Why not beat your competitor at their

own game? It is simplifying and even debasing to graphic design to overlook its potential as aid in

information propulsion. Published books, for example, require typography regardless of content.

That, say, Arundhati Roy’s The Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire might need a captivating cover to

survive better in the marketplace doesn’t mean it’s wrong to have one (it isn’t) or that the book’s

design should be immature or doesn’t matter next to its content. The content needs a vehicle, as

does all book design, and should feature the right design and typeface to express that. The book has

to sell, even if it happens to be about not selling out. Otherwise it’d be a ‘zine, Roy wouldn’t be well

known, and her 'zines would get a dedicated following but not a particularly high amount of respect.

Maybe to some, working within a capitalist apparatus taints content too much, but what else can be

expected at the moment? The resistance should not believe that if capital is unsavory, surely too is

31

capitalizing, even when used in advocation.

Realistically, impracticalities run aplenty. The cost of packaged fonts alone is reason enough for

the lack of typography used by any planned protest movement. Time and money are always lacking,

whether its at Greenpeace's Amsterdam office or at any other multinational's New York one. But

something must be worked on here. Too much is at stake, and alternative ideas are not getting the

wide, and yes, the set exposure that they need.

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*

Where We Could Do Better

Cleaning Up Mao

33

We, the consumer-citizen masses, don’t feel we should be humiliated for our enjoyment or by

our subsequent lack of guilt. We, the consumer-citizen masses, find it particularly arrogant when

intellectuals consider us the subjects of processes we cannot understand. We simply loathe the

insular terminology of Baudrillard and his ‘Simulacrum,’ Marcuse and his ‘Great Refusal.’17

The apathetic relativism of an unmotivated postmodernism even takes a certain understanding

of our failure to coherently resist. Wanting to dominate, not to be the dominated, we read this

understanding as a disguised joy. Frustrated then by a lack of trust from the Ivory Tower, we even go

so far as to not trust intellectuals. The animosity of both sides hold some merit, but neither common

sense nor theoretical postulations alone will unify us.

In his Revolution Betrayed, Leon Trotsky wrote of a 'senile capitalism' which he considered

insulting.18 There is also a level of insult in ‘The Internationale,’ song of all socialist parties, especially

in its lyric ‘Servile masses arise, arise!’ Are not senile and servile one and the same? Whose really to

blame here? It always comes back to these questions, and Anti-capitalists can’t seem to make up their

minds. Which is it? The consumer or capitalist consumerism? Socialist indecisiveness is telling.

If the system is the one and the masses another, what are the assumptions about their connected

hopelessness? The Mensheviks argued that the Soviet Union's peasant population was too culturally

backward to understand socialism. Is the American public now being seen this way, just over

understanding capitalism?

While we may not know the answer, we’re also uncomfortable enough to keep moving. There’s a

strange optimism there, because whatever this social scape is, we’re the ones giving in to it. It's much

easier to hold us down as subservient than to ever blame ourselves. We may refuse this, and dispute

as well that we should reprimand ourselves as unwilling. Regardless, we cannot make the mistake

34

“It is only people who can’t get what they want who resign themselves to want more of what

they can get. Since we cannot be friends and lovers, we wail for more candy.”

~ Bob Black

of thinking our current form is the final. Once we do, we fall perilously close to not fearing our

own decline. If we blithely walk on, we'll only be walking because Fukuyama told us so, told us that

capitalism has won. If history has become inevitability, we all lose.

Thankfully, Anti-globalization protests and movements paint the prospects of alternative futures.

Yet how are those outside the more apparent protests, more within indigenous social movements,

being represented? Let's consider Figure 7, a supple photograph of Zapatista women guarding

their community. What are we meant to believe here? We may sense and feel for the solidarity

of the women, many of whom are young girls- wearing beautiful traditional clothes and, after all,

carrying sticks, not guns. They look vigilant, surely, but still strike a somehow optimistic portrayal of

resilience. If it weren’t for the matching facecloths, and if we didn’t know where the women came

from, we might not sense the image's real context at all. How do things change with the images

of Figure 8? This time we gaze upon ferocious Maoist Nepalese women, right away a struggle

that doesn’t carry the more recognizable connotations of the Chiapas struggle. The women here,

like those of Chiapas, are still defying, still unified in their defiance, and still wearing bandanas.

Still young, they too are fighting for something they believe in. They too come from strife, living

in one of the world’s poorest countries. This time though, the women are charging, not resisting,

and fighting for a communist revolution, doing so with guns, and all under the context of what

they call the ‘People’s War.’ Their tactics include kidnapping of children in order to teach them

Mao, storming into villages, forcing families to flee, the admitted murder of a journalist, and even

charring defenseless farm animals.19 Surely these tactics are reprehensible and disturb. But that

second image of the militarist women in Figure 7 bears a striking resemblance to the original Timo

Russo photograph of the Zapatista women. The reason the Maoist images aren’t used is because no

PR campaign could ever hope to salvage the deservedly denounced ruthlessness of the rebels. Like

the men seen in this section's photograph, angling so carefully from up high, cleaning up Mao is a

mighty tough task.

The Russo shot doesn’t suffer from such problems, even taking prominence in Figure 9, on the

cover of We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anti-Capitalism, one of the better books on

its topic. The women of Chiapas are the first image seen, but the Nepal's rebellion stays quite some

distance out of the picture. The reasons these issues aren’t inspected is because the Zapatistas are

fighting for different things, goals that can be categorized more easily into their similarities with

35

other contemporary movements. The Maoists, as revolutionary communists, are the last of a dying

breed, the Zapatistas, creators of a new one.

What about this Marcos, the EZLN spokesperson who has come to be seen as its leader? What

of his image, his persuasiveness? A formidable thinker some suspect as a former professor of

Marxism, he keeps his real identify figuratively and literally under wraps. Surely the verbal is not

always adequate or most productive in providing language, yet the communiques of Marcos provide

a completely different landscape of understanding than his visual appearance, hidden in a ski-mask,

appearing both revolutionary but also criminal. As those who have in whatever sense discovered him

could tell you, he's blessed with the gift of gab. Either fearing him at first glance or in constructing

him to be hip, both which people do, alters the retrieval of his language. Marcos plays with these

conceptions of image-versus-reality. He holds guns, but essentially for show. He consciously calls

himself a ‘sub’commander, even though he's the Zapatista figurehead.

With his ski-mask, pipe and hat, Marcos is, gasp and shudder, the successor to Che and Patty

Hearst's Tania when it comes to fabled revolutionary chic. His look is not only ready to be that next

Che t-shirt, its already fast becoming it. A simple Ebay search produces, lo and behold, Marcos

shirts with striking resemblances to the ones of the past. Curious at first, the logic gradually uncoils.

Marcos is not only fashionable but his very own brand. And not only that, Marcos personifies

something newer still- the theory and actualization of the brand of anti-brands. As seen it Figure

10, when even the military hat of Marcos takes off, it becomes as popular at Urban Outfitters as that

store’s post-punk revival soundtrack, and just as pop-culture and designified. It just goes to show

trends will be sold to us just as we inflate them. And always there, secretly lurking beneath the mask?

Marcos' fiery eyes (Figure 11), looking on aware and complacently.

Travelling outside Chiapas, let’s explore the recent documentary The Fourth World War, which is

like the video accompaniment to the all-encompassing We Are Everywhere. The film was produced by

Big Noise Films, an all-volunteer collective of media-makers who have also made related grassroots

struggle documentaries like, surprise surprise, Zapatista.20 The Fourth World War is named, in

fact, after a Marcos-penned communique which described the new movement of movements as a

follow-up to the Third World War, the Cold one.21 It features for its poster, Figure 12.1, an image

of an Argentinean boy who is a piquetero, one of a group of unemployed who partakes in roadblock

protests. The captivating original photograph by Andrew Stern, Figure 12.2, is also the last of the

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twelve which grace that We Are Everywhere cover, moving it further along on the pathway to a icon.

The documentary itself is convincingly enough made propaganda, most memorably featuring

throngs of Palestinian boys throwing rocks at Israeli tanks. But when children are involved in

propaganda, are we left with any choice but to care and root for them? Scores of Chinese propaganda

posters show delightful boys and girls with dolls, flowers, needlepoint and the like. As pleasant as can

be, these representations of traditional values are hard to hate, and much harder to oppose- exactly

why they're used in the first place.

When the horror of reality meets the pleasantry of an image, or vice versa, it is only then that

we can see the complexity of a place like China, but moreover of any place, any context, of all that

becomes fuzzy when we go beyond the pale. Global justice activists often term their struggle as one

for humanity, one for life. Regardless of their great intentions, have broader strokes ever been painted

in a protest? When Naomi Klein says the Fourth World War documentary is (emphasis added): “a

powerful radical cry from the frontlines of the war on people,” does anyone suddenly want to join

the ranks and fight against themselves? Of course we’ll follow Naomi to get behind a movement to

stop a ‘war’ if the war is on people! What other option would we have? These assertions stretch on.

Molly Ivins once declared the Democratic Leadership Council to have “stupid, anti-human trade

policies.”Likewise, Guy Debord unequivocally stated “the economy has now come to declare open

war on humanity” (“Comments on the Society of the Spectacle” 39). Well, then, Guy and Molly!

Anti-human! Who’s against humanity? It’s impossible. Didn’t Bush already do this with his decree

of the war on terror? Can anyone moral argue for the use of terrorism? Of course we’ll fight it. No

one wants the jack-booted militarist enemy of yesteryear. The question is framed so that it’s not

a question at all. Much propaganda starts like this, starting with a ‘Do You’ and ending with an

impervious question mark. It’s totalizing. Its not dissimilar from the way the radical IWW Wobblies

used to call themselves the greatest thing on earth. Who wouldn't want to be a part of that? Fact is,

wars are both for and on people, and always have been. Like the never ending pursuit of profits of the

new global economy, they lift up as they likewise put down. There literally cannot be one side to war

or profits. It is clear the protesters are monopolizing – propagating their own version of life as the

only, and for all. If my life and your life and all of our lives were so simple and everyone wanted the

same thing wouldn’t we have it by now, whatever that was?

Saying one is for humanity boils down to using babies in posters. Baby speak may be implicit,

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but also implicit in the example of Figure 13 is the fact that babies simply aren't capable of making

posters, and thereby tricky territory to represent. Remember the Pulitzer Prize winning photograph

of Elián González being recovered by force by INS agents? It was downright frightening. That

one shot alone eroded countering logic because we simply cannot accept young children being

threatened. You can’t be against babies anymore than you can be against life, exactly the same reason

that ‘Pro-Choice’ would never call itself ‘Con-Life’ and ‘Pro-Life’ would never call itself ‘Con-Choice.’

The ‘Great Society’ was derided for good reason. It meant everything or nothing at all. When we

diminish the potential of words we skirt around compromise and play too partisan a game without

enough analysis. We should always be wary of any chicanery in our midst, oversimplification or

overcomplication alike. Terminology too often drifts into scapegoating and demeaning simplification,

the seizing of some words to reduce all the others needed.

Propaganda shouldn't supercede such conversations. Even when a band as agitational as Refused

uses the old Wobblies slogan “Fan the Flames of Discontent” for an album title, simply adding

“Songs to” at the front, they too are in some strange way counter-profiting from the quest for

freedom, and at the cost of alternatives. Just like the field of advertising, the claims of the album title

will be true for some but not for others, and can exist in no other way.

If marketing is now brand-as-lifestlye, resistance is too often propaganda-as-lifestyle. Through

the newness of a Marcos or the Adbusters Black Spot sneaker, we are witnessing a bold attempt at

subverting advertising and entrepreneurship into a semblance of ‘antipreneurship.’ These critiques

unfortunately fail to take into account advertising’s capability for adjustment. As Thomas Frank

can tell you, your dissent is typically commodified into the system, not above it. Ads today are not

about conformity but difference. Sound business sense understands this and flows because of our

ills not despite them. Fordism may have spurred conformity through mass production but, as seen

again in Figure 5, Ford ads now pledge the Mustang as a deservedly exotic escape from the cubicle.

The conformity of automobile culture on the whole is simply forgotten. In its place - rebel! tie and

all! Office culture is ripe for this co-option of fear but there are multitudes of others, some samples

of which are displayed in Figure 14. Like selling Stridex to teens (who didn’t worry about zits?), all

it takes is finding the fears that already exist, then putting products into the situations we face but

wish we didn’t have to. That which helped produce one type of restrictive culture readily promotes

itself as the cure for another. As soon as ‘the establishment’ restricts and upon ‘our’ discovery we

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disobey, we proceed to have our own freedom from restraint promoted back down to us. Even if

it takes becoming sheep so as not to be sheep, we’ll do it. This is how much we abhor the idea of

not being in control. This is also why there’s hardly such a thing as the hard sell anymore. When

even 9/11 bumper stickers get hawked, and grow popular, we should start to worry. And why does

this work, despite our best intentions? Because the ‘we’ became ‘the establishment.' Because when

60’s flower children grew up, the interests of advertising and rebellion tangled together towards

confluence and continue to do so. When Jean-Marie Dru, the worldwide CEO of TBWA\Chiat\Day,

names his business how-to Disruption are we surprised? Of course not. Stability is nothing if not the

contemporary business curse.

There's an insular term in Marketing-speak which encorporates all this. Called Psychographic

Segmentation, it indicates the dividing up of the market into targeted social groups. In one such

dividing, the Young & Rubican Advertising firm came up with a breakdown they called the ‘Cross

Cultural Consumer Characterization.’ That breakdown of personalities went like this- There is

the the Aspirer, the Explorer, the Mainstreamer, the Struggler, the Succeeder, the Reformer and

the Resigned. Do any of these but Mainstreamer and Succeeder sound comformist? We may be

rat-racers, going up a safe escalator to nowhere, but we're not made to sound like it anymore. The

Reformer character, for instance, is particularly interesting where I’ve added emphasis: “Freedom

from restriction, personal growth, social awareness, value for time, independent judgement, tolerance of

complexity, anti-materialistic but intolerant of bad taste” (Examstutor.com). That non-conformists are

understood this way says something disheartening, especially when such targeting isn’t hard to find

– I got this information from no less than ‘examstutor.com.’ It’s out there for any marketing student

to learn. How do we overlook this? Are we really so alienated from our own alienation?

Maybe it isn't such a stretch to say the very ‘safety’ of today has changed. We may want and need

safe cars for our family, but in getting them we need to be told we’re fearless hipsters. Anything

less is a real turn off. The Rebel Without A Cause has changed- it now has one. Paris Hilton has

her video, and 50 Cent has his nine gunshots. They are like the inverted James Deans of our

day. We forget that 50 Cent’s lifestyle is show, and that we’ve put him there. This kind of mental

programming leads to Oliver North scolding Jane Fonda with a quote like “no self-respecting

mechanic is going to fix a broken down vegetable oil-powered bus.” It avoids the real issues entirely.

Allusions of hedonism are powerless to question anything else. Welcome all to today's rebellion.

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*

Where We Could Do Better

Che = Kitsch

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Through the permeating sense of unreality that comes from ‘I’ve seen it all before,’ mediation

creates powerful distances. Form can always amaze but content too often whittles its thumbs. The

untouchable is no longer off limits. Pop culture merely waters it down, making the safe appear just

dangerous enough to be hip but harmless enough not to be. History is wholly disinterred, its politics

dislocated in the process.

Take, for a start, Figure 15, El Lissitzky’s “Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge.” When we graphic

designers idealize the form of this famous piece at the cost of its political context, we are doing

so with the luxury of being displaced from the situation that produced its creation. Divorced from

any pre-’89 atmosphere, the Cold War long forgotten, discovering El Lissitzky was a revolutionary

communist can be taken rather idly. With Lenin branded so attractively, who can be faulted for

such escapism? It gets even loopier. At the popular Mandalay Bay resort in Las Vegas, we can now

drown away our gambling loss miseries at the popular nightspot ‘Red Square,’ shown unbelievably

in Figure 16. A Leningrad-themed bar bonanza, it comes complete with copious vodka, decorative

propaganda, and, you guessed it, a Lenin statue. The original Russian 'Red' connotation spoke to

the blood to be shed for a Communist revolution. The actual ‘Red’ Square in Moscow doesn’t oddly

enough refer to communism, but the ‘Red Square’ of Malevich and Vegas carries the dominating

connotation.22 Like the pleasant but numbing effects of its slot machines, given the Las Vegas

touch, even Soviet collectivism can be turned into a blanket of kitsch and simulation. Regardless of

personal opinions on the Russian Revolution, its goals or dissolution, as visual agers we let the ‘Red

Squares’ of the world exist, even enjoying them. Is it any wonder we feel disjointed? This dislocation

of form from content most pungently rears its ugly head when politics become involved. It does so

particularly when all the really tough decision making is in the past and no longer relevant to us. So

even with Russian Constructivism, as popular as it is, the ignored whole is more than the sum of its

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“It’s like Che is SpongeBob or something.”

~ Johnny Havana, owner of theCHEstore.com

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pleasurable parts. We forget Communism politicized the art to such a degree its promotion was the

very imperative for its creation. Things may be pretty safe and comfortable from our bubble, but the

Marlboro Man was once a symbol just as cunning and effective as Lenin. That it isn't anymore, and

instead widely hated, speaks to a wise decision in the case of tobacco propagation to keep on digging.

The singular political icon this century, the image of Che matches the cowboy of cigarettes in both

appeal and countering controversy. In light of Anti-globalization, the lineage of Che's icon provides

a sad glimpse into the future for Marcos at the least, and perhaps the whole movement at worst. Like

James Dean, Che’s legacy as image has much to do with dashing good looks and dying young, not

his actions outside the spotlight, however shocking. Seen over a progression of images in Figures

17.1 and 17.2, we follow Mr. Guevara as he moves from his his most famous incarnation, a portrait by

photographer Alberto Korda, to less political purposes. First printed on a just-so hemp green tee, Che

eventually becomes a Pop Culture psychedelic pin-up, a souvenir, an accessory, a gateway, a symbol

to impersonate but not to espouse. How did we get from a paramilitary of paramount significance

to a National Lampoon cover gag? Part of the blame lies in the usurption of the ultra real by ultra

capitalism. In such a world, we're all left with a pie in the face.

If all our values are being usurped by the market, and all desire is in the realm of advertising, its

only logical that the want to resist it, and the desire to not desire would eventually be marketed as

well. Like the Caucasian co-option of Rasta dreadlocks, originally carrying a spiritual significance,

teens wear Che shirts to identify themselves as rebels. Yet when knowledge of context is irregardless

to style, fashion becomes irresponsible. If wearing a Che or Marcos shirt is fine, what about Mao?

Where do we draw the line? We've created theChestore.com, of course, but rather predictably.

We've also created proletarianthreads.com. What’s it really about? Could it be proving something to

ourselves? Or supporting a dwindling philosophy by bearing a tee, not arms? American citizens are

immersed in yet oddly displaced from its power. We often support causes dislodged from ourselves,

eager to shoulder another’s burden, a grand dream whose reality is rather risky. When the non-local

decide what the local should be, wouldn’t we usually consider that gentrification? Fair-trade seems

downright idealic until you realize it depends completely on the kindness of powerful strangers,

a kindness which can easily flip. Populism isn’t a tool for the powerful to laud over the crowd and

was never supposed to be. The inverse of suburban alienation isn’t necessarily wondrous activist

connections with anything that strikes our fancy. We need not be Margaret Meads, glamorizing

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human nature, overarching in ideals and commitments. We can’t simply displace global views with

our own American conception. We have to be context-specific. I can respect aspects of the Zapatista

struggle but don’t have the right to claim it as my own. I have enough respect for the peoples of

Chiapas to know I’ve never been nor never will be a Mayan. As Westernizing Mao’s “Little Red Book”

was always about you anyway, carrying it was not necessarily respect for the proletariat. Even though

their connection would seem intrinsic, outside of China we had the freedom to read or not read it as

we pleased, while inside China they did not. We still have a veneer of choice, if not its full potential.

To paraphrase Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter’s The Rebel Sell, we can all have our very own Buy

Nothing Day every day we wish to.23 As soon as we’re forced to Buy Nothing, we’re back in the Soviet

Union, waiting in the bread line.

*

Where We Could Do Better

What’s Fair, Laid Bare

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Globalization, it once was said, likens “to the intensification of the consciousness of the world as a

whole ”(Robertson 8). Rather than a layered distancing between consumers and issues unrelated to

consumption, this view implies a raised consciousness, not a lowered one. A knowledge economy

entails furthering disclosure. Just as brands were originally supposed to stand for consumer

protection, speaking some unverifiable truth about the product represented, they must now respond

to the call of the day. When brands depend on people, they cannot overrule them. As questions of

value are increasingly waged, companies will have to respond. Through their brands and constructed

answers they will do so. In how the subject field is defined, these answers will also define their power.

But in how we define a response, until its no longer so feeble or delayed, our questions in return will

have definitions of our own, ones of debate and of prodding. We may be seeing a rare chance for

closing the gap between their intent and ours. Its up to us.

In that brands increasingly are the product, they are divorced from objective physicality. They

represent not the things that they do, but larger values which people support. As DeBord put it, “the

ruling order discourses endlessly upon itself in an uninterrupted monologue of self-praise” ("Society

of the Spectacle" 19). Branding couldn't support itself any other way. Dominion doesn't take to self

condemnation lightly, never has and never will. But we can still learn how to use adaptability to

our advantage. For, if hubris and greed is our motto, it will rule, but if we make something else our

choice, the market has to follow. Deep down, left with no other choice, the marketplace must always

market itself.

So how can we claim our mental environment when advertising, even in its brilliance, too often

belittles it? How to react once we fall prey to not wanting to fall at all? Alternative desires have no

choice but to scuttle more and more on the margins. Even as we respect something like Do-It-

Yourself culture, and we should, we forget DIY is already a business model, just one under the title

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“It is not enough to know what to say - one must know how to say it.”

~ Aristotle

limited edition. While neither behaviorists nor trained in diplomacy, we can help shape the agenda

as consumers by making the marketplace more conducive to our own conception of positive values,

the ones we feel may have gone missing. Thankfully, there's wide room for a confluence of mutual

interest. Heightened ethical sensitivity can be a 'product' of the times. It won't last forever, but at this

point, doesn’t it have to start? We’ve waited long enough. We can’t get behind “Social Responsibility”

if its merely a government hand-me-down, or some sort of cultish groupspeak. We can’t just open up

some ethics toolkit to double check ourselves. We’re going to have to really believe in what we really

want to believe, and follow through by making the corresponding choices.

If you want to be an alternative consumer today, whatever you choose that to mean, the Whole

Foods of the Earth will be more than happy to pop up and feed that need. Having new choices is a

great thing, but the lines increasingly blur. New demands will increase supply but when these needs

can be met too easily, new ones will have to be made up. Once the marketers can catch onto this, if

they haven't already, they won’t let go.

Unfortunately, too, the potential of small, alternative start-ups to succeed will also shrink once

supply organizes itself, and as these start-ups go through the process of merging. These mergers are

a double-edged dilemma because they only happen once the start-up was very successful, becoming

either powerful enough to buy someone else or wanted enough to be bought. This is why a Unilever

buys eco-friendly Ben & Jerry’s, why a Kellogg’s buys Morningstar. It is why Altria owns Kraft which

owns both Oscar Meyer and Boca Burger. Incongruity has nothing on consolidation. Cigarettes, mac

n' cheese, hot dogs, vegetarianism... to the Capitalist and the marketer, if it sells, it sells.

And yet a magazine rack of The Nation and Stay Free at the Whole Foods checkout is still working

off the same principles as the candy rack at the Kroger checkout. We're missing more than can be

easily filled, and much bigger questions refuse to subside.

Do we increasingly believe that a culture of consumption leads to a consumption of culture? That

the quest for abundance is not our raison d’être? Maybe the weights that hold us down aren’t so

heavy at all. Maybe we forge a way removed the idolatry of holy goods when we accept how lucky we

are, and that its time for others to be lucky too.

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*

Where We’ve Been

A MayDay for May 68

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The fulfillment of any goal requires practical considerations, carefully weighed. Case in point: May,

1968. Paris is uprising. Pamphlets and posters are propagating. The establishment is upset and

the messages are upsetting. Most famous among these are the visual works of the Atelier Populaire

(Popular Workshop). Through it’s impeccably conceived designs and slogans, we find one of the best

examples of what strong and authentic authorship can do in protest messaging. The brevity in which

the Populaire created its demonstration graphics at first hardly shows itself. But how could this be?

What makes this particular case so special? The protesters were mostly students, but that's often the

case. As students approach full assimilation into the working force they seek to fight off approaching

cynicism. In their youth, they haven’t forgotten how to dream. In the Paris of ‘68, students continued

this trend. Fighting to be the next Robespierres, they surged into their roles with gusto and aplomb.

They did so not just with vibrant vitriol but with a certain exuberance, a certain joie de vivre. But

May’s General Strike was different even in that lineage - nine million people simply stopped working.

Yet it was different even still. Like the Critical Masses and Reclaim The Streets they inspired, the

protests of Paris were as much a street festival as typical street revolt.

Students, occupying the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, used the tools of the school’s lithographic

department to concoct their work.24 Seen this way, no wonder the work was so fruitful! The supplies

were free, the goal was in common, and temporarily, at least, the work didn’t have to exist under

any economic system. Lacking the capitalist impulse to have to advertise to consumers, citizens

advertised something else, in some other way – ideas, as weapons, used by certain citizens, against

others. Predating the pirate radio stations which would come to challenge by yelling ‘Reclaim the

Media!’ the students did just that. Now, if on a continual basis Anti-globalization protests had such a

setup, if any movement had such a setup, using the system to critique itself would be the rule, not the

exception. By and large this is not the case because no system too easily allows for its own downfall.

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“Under the pavement, the beach!”

~ May 1968 Slogan

Lets consider for a moment what the Atelier had to say about their work: “The posters produced

by the Atelier Populaire are weapons in the service of the struggle and are an inseparable part of it.

Their rightful place is in the centers of conflict, that is to say, in the streets and on the walls of the

factories. To use them for decorative purposes, to display them in bourgeois places of culture or to

consider them as objects of aesthetic interest is to impair both their function and their effect” (Social

Design Notes). Now, if these posters are really to be considered as ‘weapons’ in a struggle, we’ve

more than possibly gone too far. In politics, words are not physically, tangibly violent, though they

do work as their representation. A weapon itself both is and isn’t a communicator. When speaking

with a weapon says stop in killing it then assures it. No dialogue can begin or end from a dead man’s

lips. While people can be killed, ideas and memes cannot, and communication will carry on. So even

if graphic design might somehow be ashamed of its ephemerality, or how, in the words of Michael

Beirut, it is “an embarrassingly low-risk enterprise,” it is, at least, still alive and breathing. This

entails design's ability to still work for negotiation and not absolutes. After all, thank god, no design

job is as high-risk as a soldier’s, no design campaign as permanent or one-sided as a bullet.

If May ‘68 posters are really to be called ‘weapons,’ the line of thinking continues towards the

assumption that each and every advertisement is an imposition of the powerful onto the weak. We

are left with no choice but to ask yet again - are we American consumers really so feeble? The May

posters were power grabbing in reverse but would never go so far as to admit it.

One of many memorable Situationist slogans spouted, “we don’t want a world where the guarantee

that we shall not die of starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom” (Plant 73). In this, the students

of ‘68 were disappointingly similar to those who now bemoan ClearChannel’s homogenizing of

popular entertainment. Like the popularity of McDonald’s upon opening in Moscow, ClearChannel,

by playing Top 40, provides what is wanted, not too much more, not too much less. Its really not so

baffling. While you can dislike the taste of the masses you can't ignore them. That isn't to say our

culture doesn’t somehow suffer from ClearChannel, but is anyone starving because of it? People

around the globe do starve because of a lack of trade. Is cultural imperialism alone reason enough

to recoil at the opening up of trade? Can living standards be raised without cultural interference,

without a deification of capitalism, the tool for development assistance to begin with? This would be

the true ideal. Salon’s David Rieff argues no, “for unlike adjustments in American foreign policy,

adjustments in the global system that would, without transforming other cultures, still bring wealth

49

are difficult to even imagine, let alone implement.” Perhaps Rieff is right. American capitalism is

American, and this is the capitalism which grows. Yet if so, the refusal of one kind of development

must not be lack of development altogether. Growth is not madness, whatever the protest graffiti may

say. The erasing of differences through Globalization does happen, and is happening, but it may be

a side effect to a globalist economy, not its necessary or evil agenda. These changes too need not be

either irreversible or inevitable. When differences reassert themselves, culture and difference can be

maintained, and using visual communication can help. In the case of May ‘68, it already did.

50

*

Where We’ve Been

So Swiss, So Clean

51

If the world is evaluated by anti-Globalization protestors as falling into the grasp of cold, neoliberal,

integrated conformity, surely it follows that the International Typographic Style, being also dogmatic,

strict, and brazenly rigid, would be overruled as style choice and forum for corporate protest. A

lack of Modernist aesthetic would imply a viewpoint of its perceived complicity in promoting top-

down hierarchical viewpoints from the West. It would seem there are those who see the profession

of graphic design today as the new corporate world’s conspicuous consumption on itself, simply

another ostentatious part of what Adam Smith called 'the parade of riches.' It doesn’t have to be

this way. The missionary zeal of both free market fundamentalists and extreme Anti-globalization

activists mirrors that of some International Style adherents. How did this viewpoint come about and

what are its consequences?

As Corporations, particularly American ones, became multinational in the postindustrial age, they

needed a universal style to visually identify themselves. As a style of no styles, global in reach, the

Modernist aesthetic answered this quest. In an act of radicalism, the International Typographic Style

of Swiss Modernism became the signature Corporate style. Originally Bauhausian and Constructivist,

Modernist political roots were simply uprooted and replaced. Co-opted into squeaky-clean corporate

imaging, the Swiss Mode became almost exclusively associated with it.

Despite Massimo Vignelli’s assertion that modernism was less style, more a way of thinking,

the style of no styles was always both a style and mode of thought, applicable to powerful interests.

Art critic Susan Tallman has rightly characterized Helvetica Bold as the signature typeface of

postindustrial capitalism, but if anything, and to simplify, Helvetica on a grid is about neutrality. In

an incorporating world where tip-toeing is a neccessity, Helvetica's greyness is its strongest selling

point and its largest flaw. Helvetica is your daily business suit. It allows for a set perception. Plenty of

bad corporations may have good Swiss design, but plenty of great ones do too. Both the soulful and

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“What is simple should be treated simply, what is difficult should be reduced to the simplest terms.”

~ Josef Müller-Brockmann

soulless have to wear that same suit in the morning.

Globalization itself, as well as its responses, exists through the complex mediation of opposing

values. As Globalization places the world into a grid of its own devising – that of the market’s, an

ethos of necessity permeates into representations of safety, and what could be more safe than the

Swiss Typographic Style? After all, Swiss design being so comfortable might have something to do

with the country’s living standards and all the offshore private banking it provides. A good argument

has been made therefore that the downside to Swiss Modernism lies in these overly tidy tendencies.

In such a view, the tendencies can become dangerous because representations of disavowed

voices are oppressed through a visual absence, condensed and kept away. This goes quite a way in

explaining why “In 1966 the German graphic designer Olaf Leu wrote that German design no longer

had any national attributes” (Bruggemann).

When, for a time, a Baroque excess overruled this tidiness, it was because the New Wave style

included permission to include the prohibited. A newer, more wide-ranging graphic design might

draw attention today to the margins, the texts of books, rather than the mere text of opposition

manifested by a handwritten sign. I mean not to belittle opposition or its simplification - its a start,

and a duty. Rather, I wish to see a reaching for a larger context, in which the preparation of dialogues

might involve graphic design so as to even the playing field. As Civil society forges its own interests,

let it take the reins in presenting itself.

It is in this hope and shunning of the past that design educator and critic Denise Gonzales

Crisp has sought to establish her DecoRational style and concept. Firmly aware of class and

cosmopolitanism, the DecoRational seeks an intelligent balance of Cranbrook excess with modernist

strengths and a political sensibility. While the DecoRational cannot enforce cultural conservatism,

it may, in providing emotional immediacy, reinforce it. To connect cultural politics with design,

we need to consider distinctive idioms and ornamentation overruled for mainstream culture and

presentation. The same utopian dreams which propelled William Morris' socialist politics also had

a hand in his decorative typography, his hope for a certain style of design. Moving forward slightly,

Austrian architect Adolf Loos had an altogether different vision. His admonishment of such Morris-

promoted ornamentation had a key role in modernist lineage, influencing Gropius and Le Corbusier.

“The lower the culture," he said, "the more apparent the ornament. Ornament is something that

must be overcome. The Papuan and the criminal ornament their skin. . . . But the bicycle and

53

the steam engine are free of ornament. The march of civilization systematically liberates object

after object from ornamentation” (Loos 99-103). The quote's hubris is intriguing, and its political

ramifications connect to current conceptions of Globalization as a grand civilizer most unwelcome.

Following on Loos' beliefs, German Social Democratic leader and Marxist Revisionist Eduard

Bernstein espoused (emphasis added): “however much violence, fraud, and other unworthy actions

accompanied the spread of European rule in earlier centuries, as they often still do today, the other

side of the picture is that, under direct European rule, savages are without exception better off than they

were before” (153-154).

If lack of decoration connects to the process of being civilized, who is doing the civilizing becomes

of utmost importance. If America is this civilizer, this international gendarme, and the second Iraq

war would seem to confirm our role as the world’s policeman, advertising may already have all

the homogenizing power it needs. There’s a fine line between enforcement and bullying. Have we

crossed it?

54

*

Where We Could Go

Scala Scales The Fence

55

In an earlier Globalization, we see other ties to dialogue. The need for writing came from the need

to record transactions of importance, including trade itself. The French word ‘Bourgeoisie’ derives

itself from the Italian word ‘borghese,’ which, among other meanings, referred to traders. Moreover

for our purposes, hybridized languages, called pidgins, resulted as a consequence of colonization.

Common ground was needed linguistically between the new and old, the arrivals and the originals.

To get there, words and phrases went through a process, called dialectic leveling, in which differences

in speakers would tend to erode over time. Even though the new languages may have been ‘imposed,’

positive features of such leveling ran aplenty. With understanding, came cooperation, with

negotiation, less violence. Only a few pidgins, like Creole, are left with us today, but we can learn a

valuable lesson from them.

A goal of any movement is larger numbers, but always with a core, with solidarity. Some might

say preaching to the choir is fine as long as it makes the choir stronger. But how strong will the choir

ever get if it doesn’t expand, or worse, cannot? New pidgins are needed for the choir to soar.

As your appearance should ideally not be cause for derision, so too should your ideals not be so

strongly on your sleeve as to make your appearance a closed conversation. If a suit is an imposition,

just not to those who accept it, a mohawk is an imposition, just not to those who accept it. The

one is as imposing to the other as the other is to the one. We’re getting nowhere when ‘the man in

the suit’ and ‘the mohawk’ hate each other, especially when I even cliché in such terms. Likewise,

there should never be a bouncer at the protest picking who gets to go in. The beautification of

multiculturalism shouldn't rear into a realm of authenticity lauded recklessly over others. The

channels of a complex, reformative movement are by their very nature not wide open to outside

access but even still, the message, not the messenger, should reign supreme. Debunking the

message because of the messengers, irrespective to its content, is both weak and particularly

56

“We have come to a fork in the road.”

~ Secretary-General Kofi Annan

prevalent. The ‘impartial’ mainstream press follows the use of extreme tactics because without them

it has no story. The disadvantage to this consumerist-driven sensationalism comes at least in the

advantage of the government staying out of the picture. But if the media has become increasingly

tepid in speaking truth to power, which is, after all, one of its best and brightest goals, it might be

because we’d rather be told what we already believe. Fox News came about through the crystal clear

Capitalist understanding that you become successful simply by filling a need not yet met. To those

sick of ‘the liberal bias,’ they did exactly that. That Fox wades into waters of ‘Infotainment,’ or that

others are following, these things don’t come into such equations. Fox has hit big for the same reason

USA Today dumbed-down its text. It sells. And it does so because however sorry things get, we are

being given what we ask for. When it’s all said and done, who wouldn’t want roads but no taxes, a Big

Mac, not a President?

Now then, while new ‘members’ may not join a movement because of a banner they saw, and well

possibly shouldn’t in fact, a well-conceived one, both in writing and design, has the power to create

new conditions of awareness. Those on the margins may or may not provide solutions but almost

always will bring interesting perspectives. Since not every political movement should be valued,

letting the groups present themselves in a market of ideas is to be valued.

Crimethinc, the infamous ‘ex-workers collective’ from the Northwest, do just this. They produce

thought-provoking posters of interest and appeal, providing them for free over the mail and through

their website. These posters take elements of ‘professional’ graphic design and hybridize them,

imbuing them with a lingering effect. In using higher end design, they represent their ideas in

a broader, more accessible fashion, the equivalent of donning the suit when the suit is required

while never, all the while, forgetting the suit, like language itself, is but an arbitrary agreement. In

a particularly compelling poster, we see a group of masked protestors with the tagline, ‘Behind Our

Masks, We Are You.’ These words immediately impel us to seek out our common bonds, rather than

relying on our instinctual habits of fear or bitter distrust. The poster uses the Dutch designer typeface

Scala, as does this paper. Created by esteemed typographer Martin Majoor, it is a dignified face

which is widely used for cultural and literary uses, often in the logo for a Museum or University Book

press. It exists as a new face of choice for many designers as well as writers. Since the conditions

for voices of difference to exist are rare and numerous, these voices may in turn lose availabile

accessibility outside their own interest circle. Using a face like Scala assists in creating an intelligent

57

yet approachable reading. In doing so, the Crimethinc poster doesn't, either, somehow try to become

everything to everyone, as if it were even able to. It still speaks in a particularized tongue, but through

using stand-by design for new perspectives, it also avoids standards of decorum or the lack thereof,

and thereby surpasses potentially diminishing idioms.

In the past, this open-yet-closed type of speech was of a more obstructive kind, one tracing back

to the psychedelic posters of the 60’s underground. In newer posters of a similar accord, seen in

comparison in Figure 18, the duo Seripop further a form over function paradigm with frenzied

tour posters for noise-rock bands. In both cases of posters, the perceived illegibility which reigns

so supreme is not only purposeful, it is an affront to the general public, and part of the very code

which binds the social network together. These are works who only speak to who they only speak

to. As strange luck would have it, noise rock is also a genre-as-exclusionary-club in which we can

somewhat sneak into. American noise rock bands have named themselves things like Andrew

Jackson Jihad, thee Hydrogen Terrors, This Bike Is A Pipe Bomb, Osama Bin SARS, Talibam, and

the USAISAMONSTER. In these identifications, we see not just naming conventions which agitate,

hoping for knee-jerk political reactions to make us more critical. We also see a game of peer pressure,

a club, one in which bands see who will go the farthest without taking too much responsibility for

their offensiveness. These are the kinds of clubs where either status or ‘in the know’ genuineness

is the key condition to admittance, the ones where a constant fear pervades that the new will be a

detracting threat and so new members are by and large not wanted. These are the exclusionary clubs,

the ones of both under and overground, Anarchist Squatters and Yale’s Skull and Bones alike. The

movement protesting neoliberal globalization should not, cannot, be one of these clubs. Its goals are

too big and there is far too much on the line.

58

*

Where We Could Go

Globalize Democratic Graphic Design!

59

A rare profession in many ways, graphic design is one which changes rapidly and consistently. It

is one whose structure is determined ever strongly by technological advances. There is of late an

increasing universalization of both the tools of graphic design and the freedom to use these tools as

you will. This despecialization is a source of heated debate within the profession. While some will

banter about fears of deprofessionalization, design critic and educator extraordinaire Ellen Lupton

will surely exemplify those who support the approaching new tide in her soon to be published DIY

– Design It Yourself. The re-evaluation of the ‘expert’ may be at hand.

Until a new motive of making ads for advocacy becomes more enunciated, more practical, cultural

and political sign-makers are losing out. By not speaking in a ‘professional’ language, they allow

those who would to retain prominence and power. Just compare the WTO website with a typical

Anti-globalization one. Doubtless the comparison is inadequate on several levels. The WTO is a

very centralized echelon of power and its counters often decentralized newbies on the block. The

WTO will of course have the superior website, the thoroughly organized publications department,

the better promotional appearance. But with the Internet, it could also be very possible to run one's

own professional publications department, one of the sort where distribution was not a significant

problem for start-up. Protest literature and speeches could be typed, typeset, and turned into pdf.’s,

made immediately available to as many as could find them, as many as design could help to promote.

In the meantime, until we all lose superficial tendencies and as a whole wish to go deeper, both pro

and con movements shouldn’t be criminalized for wanting to polish their appearance. That appearing

composed creates trust doesn’t equate to classifying those who would then trust as pawns. We don’t

60

“None can judge with certainty who is right and who is wrong, who is nearest to the truth, or which is

the best way to achieve the greatest good for each and everyone. Freedom, coupled by experience, is

the only way of discovering the truth and what is best; and there is no freedom if there is a denial of

the freedom to err.”

~ Errico Malatesta

need to wait and see how populist alternative medias will play out when we can have a hand in their

creation. Blogs are a fine example of democratic authorship, and its increasing power. Of course,

that any politico with a vague but unspooling knowledge of graphic design can speak their mind with

visuals means neither that they know what they’re saying, thinking, or designing. As the Internet has

not, despite its multitude of voices, put societal debate on a pedestal of Socratic inquiry, neither will

the new landscape be oblivious to common sense and fact checking, and neither will our minds lose

the ability to question, our hearts to feel. We'll just have more to think about, as we wade through all

the propaganda we'll now deem to be as much, instead of calling it otherwise.

Shouting isn’t enough to getting yourself truly heard. If the movement of movements hopes to be

a specific discourse with specific values, it cannot rely on the good wishes of passerbyers, particularly

abstracted messages, or a dearth of them. It cannot rely on handwriting, but should use it when

appropriate. The protestors should deliberately speak the same language their readers do, but not

exclusively, not at the cost of losing potential new readers. For hopeful examples, they might turn to

the design of such magazines such as Adbusters, especially in the era of Chris Dixon's art direction,

or in the special Design Anarchy issue, wonderfully guest art directed by Jonathan Barnbrook. They

might also enjoy the continuing design adventure known as Colors magazine, South Africa's I-Jusi,

the British Ode, and future attempts at the DecoRational to be posted at decorational.org. Adbusters

notwithstanding, these works are not entirely agitational or political on the surface, yet neither

still Trojan Horses. They are all political acts involving graphic design which can still be valued as

something surpassing top-down propaganda.

By increasing the level of debate and content (the what), the tactics and signs of dissent (the how),

won’t get more attention than they deserve. This is the real ideal, the dream closer to the participatory

Democracy of Jurgen Habermas’s ‘public sphere.’25

When it comes to Globalization, replacing a theology of progress with a theology of liberation still

forces us to follow a theology. It divides too cleanly and imbues the Supernatural. It also forgets that

Enlightenment humanism, like Religion, has its limits.

I wish for debate to broaden, for the intrinsic aspects of specialists be despecialized, for countering

voices hitherto overlooked to be raised. When we delineate from the standard path of propaganda, it

is then we’ll start getting somewhere, and maybe it wont be that somewhere, the one of utopias, ours

or theirs, but at the least it won't be here, standing still.

61

62

*

“Deeds, not words.”

~ The Suffragettes

*

Figure 1

Chris Wood's McDonald’s Nation.

63

*

Figure 2

Distressed typography also seeks to reclaim the streets.

64

*

Figure 3

Diesel's ‘ACTION! For Successful Living’ campaign.

65

*

Figure 4

Clothing As Rhetoric: The Black Bloc and their Jackets.

66

*

Figure 5

“Work In A Cubicle?” What Fordism conceives, the Mustang relieves.

67

*

Figure 6

Bad signs are a bad sign.

68

*

Figure 7

Zapatista women and girls on guard.

69

*

Figure 8

Maoist Nepalese women on attack.

70

*

Figure 9

Cover of We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anti-Capitalism.

71

*

Figure 10

Subcomandante Marcos, left. Urban Outfitters cap, right.

72

*

Figure 11

The mysterious Marcos: behind the mask, those fiery eyes.

73

*

Figure 12.1

Poster for The Fourth World War

74

*

Figure 12.2

Original Photograph for The Fourth World War Poster

75

*

Figure 13

Baby speak.

76

*

Figure 14

Rebel! Tie and all!

77

*

Figure 15

El Lissitzky’s Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge.

78

*

Figure 16

Russia's Red Square meets the Vegas Red Square.

79

*

Figure 17.1

Che: a symbol’s slippery slope. Part 1.

80

*

Figure 17.2

Che: a symbol’s slippery slope. Part 2.

81

*

Figure 18

Psychedelic Rock poster from San Francisco, left. Noise Rock poster from Seripop, right.

82

See Vance Packard’s seminal The Hidden Persuaders (New York: David McKay Co., 1957).

For a critique of the “ownership society,” see Larry J. Brown, Robert Kuttner, and Thomas

M. Shapiro, Building A Real “Ownership Society” (Washington: The Century Foundation,

2005). Free download available at: http://www.tcf.org/publications/retirementsecurity/

ownershipsociety.pdf.

The George W. Bush administration has been called the “oil and gas administration.”

See in particular, the BBC’s Analysis: Oil and the Bush cabinet at:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/1138009.stm.

A partial run-down of ties:

* The first U.S. president with a Master of Business Administration degree, President George

W. Bush was a West Texas oilman for 11 years. He was the Founder and CEO of Arbusto

Energy Inc., later renamed Bush Exploration, which itself merged with Spectrum 7 Energy

Corp, where Bush was Chairman and CEO. The Dallas-based Harken Energy Corporation

bought Spectrum 7, where Mr. Bush remained on the board of directors. Mr. Bush was also a

former Board Member of Tom Brown Inc., a large independent energy company.

* Vice President Dick Cheney was for five years CEO of the world’s largest oil-service

company, the Dallas-based Halliburton Company.

* Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was a member of the board of directors of Chevron.

* Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld “has between $3.25 million and $15.5 million worth

of investments in energy-related companies,” according to a report at: http://www.fpif.org/

pdf/petropol/book.pdf.

* Former Secretary of Commerce Donald Evans was a CEO of Tom Brown, Inc.

Writing in the April 27, 2001 edition of The Guardian, Julian Borger opined,“In the Bush

administration, business is the only voice... This is as close as it is possible to get in a

democracy to a government of business, by business and for business.”

83

Notes

1.

2.

3.

The “short 20th century” is in regards to Eric Hobsbawm's The Age of Extremes: A History of

the World, 1914-1991 (New York: Vintage, 1996).

Author of Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Frederic Jameson

illuminates the point further in his work The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University

Press, 1994).

Thomas Friedman used the term in his editorial “The Coalition to Keep Poor People Poor,”

which appeared in the April 24, 2001 edition of The New York Times.

See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000) and

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004).

‘Kibbutzem’ is the plural of ‘kibbutz,’ the Hebrew word for “communal settlement.”

According to the Jewish Virtual Library: “The kibbutz is a unique rural community; a society

dedicated to mutual aid and social justice; a socioeconomic system based on the principle

of joint ownership of property, equality and cooperation of production, consumption and

education; the fulfillment of the idea “from each according to his ability, to each according to

his needs”; a home for those who have chosen it.” For more, consult http://www.

jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Society_&_Culture/kibbutz.html.

b) Stalin’s decidedly nationalistic idea of “socialism in one country,” for one example,

propelled forced collectivization and a strict centralization of power.

Refers to Mireille Guiliano's French Women Don’t Get Fat: The Secret of Eating For Pleasure

(New York: Knopf, 2004)

The freedom fries renaming is not without precedent. In protest of Germany during World

War II, some Americans renamed the sauerkraut and hamburger the ‘liberty cabbage’ and the

‘liberty steak.’

84

Notes

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

85

Naomi Klein is author of No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (Toronto: Random, 2000).

On the Mass Games, the “most elaborate human performance on earth,” see the documentary

“State of Mind.” More information on the film can be found at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbc

four/documentaries/features/state-of-mind.shtml.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was the first individual to call himself an "anarchist."

He is credited with the proclamation"Property is Theft!"

‘Bobo’ refers to a bourgeois bohemian. See David Brooks’s Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper

Class and How They Got There (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).

For more on Mongoven, Biscoe & Duchin, and PR Front Groups, see: http://tc.bmjjournals.

com/cgi/content/full/11/2/112, http://www.prwatch.org/prwissues/1996Q2 and http://www.

prwatch.org/prwissues/1994Q3.

Professor of Graphic Design at Yale University, Michael Rock defined the concept of "The

designer as author" in his article of the same name, on pps. 237-244, in Looking Closer 4:

Critical Writings on Graphic Design (New York: Allworth Press, 2002).

On Jean Baudrillard and his ‘Simulacrum,’ see his “Simulacra and Simulations,” in Jean

Baudrillard: Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988),

pps. 166-184. For more on ‘The Great Refusal,’ see Herbert Marcuse’s An Essay on Liberation

(Boston: Beacon Press, 1969) and his One Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964;

second edition, 1991).

See the website: http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1936-rev/ch12.htm.

Notes

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

86

On the kidnapping of children in order to teach them Mao:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/3573402.stm

On storming into villages, forcing families to flee, and charring defenseless farm animals:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/4346597.stm

On the the admitted murder of a journalist:

http://www.ifex.org/en/content/view/full/65525/

For more information on the documentaries, Big Noise Films is at bignoisefilms.com.

Another Zapatista documentary of interest is Nettie Wild’s 1998 A Place Called Chiapas.

The Zapatista Communique which speaks of “The Fourth World War,” is at:

http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/auto/fourth.html

The original Red Square of Moscow is “Krasnaya Ploschad” in Russian; “Krasnaya” means

both “red” but also “beautiful,” and so, the latter reference, denoting St. Basil’s Cathedral at

the southern end of the square, was the original meaning.

Refers to one of the original inspirations for this paper, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter's

The Rebel Sell (Toronto, Ontario: HarperCollins Publishers, 2005).

Interestingly enough, at the same school, and also in ‘68, a group of architecture students

calling themselves Utopie also held to the promise of their name. Inspired by fellow radical

architecture group Archigram, they produced inflatable architecture. One of the group’s

members was none other than writer Jean Baudrillard.

The ‘public sphere’ refers to Jurgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public

Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).

Notes

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

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