Christine Harold, OurSpace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture. University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
I read Naomi Klein’s new book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism immediately before Christine Harold’s OurSpace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture. Klein’s book was welcome: rather than focusing on dialogues within the left that take the right as self-evidently wrong (something that I am frequently guilty of doing), Klein’s book documents the rise of Milton Friedman’s brand of neo-liberal economics, spread by the Chicago School across the globe and resulting in the devastation of countries from Chile to Iraq and beyond. Although her thesis of “disaster capitalism” – the deliberate profiteering of capitalism whenever a cataclysm occurs – is so broad that it will be critiqued as simplistic, her narration of the calculating ways in which capital has mobilized itself around disasters in order to facilitate privatizations and other aspects of the Friedmanite agenda is strong. Evoking without buying into ideas that the right is a pack of crazies who exacerbate catastrophes for their own malevolent ends, The Shock Doctrine is a reminder of the need to resist the corporate control of societies from the local to the global.
Klein ends with a very (too) brief chapter on spaces in which resistance to disaster capitalism has emerged, and it is within such ideas of resistance that Christine Harold situates her work. She deftly juggles in OurSpace the competing discourses of leftist resistance to cultural corporatism and the need to acknowledge the ways in which cultural critiques are situated within neoliberal processes of production. Situating herself between Naomi Klein’s work in No Logo and Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter’s Nation of Rebels (published in Canada as The Rebel Sell) she evaluates the rhetorical effects of works that have sought to intervene in the practices of capitalism in the West in the recent past. This project takes her through analyses of MySpace, the Situationist International and the May ’68 uprisings, the work of Adbusters magazine, pranksters like Joey Skaggs, cultural piracy, open source computer programming, and the rise of cultural practices based upon the open source model. Strong in her thinking, and helped by a well-written analysis grounded in her rhetorical training, Christine Harold’s OurSpace is at once a useful history of recent attempts at cultural subversion in the West and an intelligent critique of the shortcomings and possibilities of those attempts.
The book structures itself in five chapters, with two “intermezzos” modeled on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire providing personal reflections on the work’s issues. In the first and second chapters, Harold establishes her relationship to recent counter-capitalist critiques. Klein’s work is characterized as advocating rallying against “a brand-saturated dystopia,” while Heath and Potter are said to argue that “countercultural spaces are consistently reduced to mere markets” (xxi) – the latter of which is a fair take. Harold would like to situate herself in the middle. She would rather argue that we should “instead consider modes of ‘resistance’ that are not predicated on independence from markets” as she tries “to imagine the public and public space in ways other that the traditional ‘independence versus co-optation’ binary” (xxi-xxii). For her, publics are everywhere, rather than being enclaves to be protected against privatization or the government. As in the work of Deleuze and Hardt and Negri that animates her work, there is no outside to capital; instead, what is necessary is the intelligent negotiation of its contours. Harold thus finds that the works of the Situationist International, like that of Adbusters, is characterized by processes of sabotaging consumer culture that look for just such an outside. This search takes place either through the détournement of what Guy Debord called the Spectacle of late capitalist society, or through the culture jamming that Kalle Lasn and the Adbusters set advocate. Such practices are found to be playful yet lacking; “Parody, as negative critique,” Harold writes, “can never offer new responses to the rhetoric of consumer culture, as it provides only a vocabulary for saying ‘no’” (30-31). The subvertisements of Adbusters and others are clever, she notes, but do not provide us with any sort of alternative.
From the “smug self-satisfaction” of culture jamming rhetoric (55), Harold moves on in chapters three and four to deal with counter-cultural processes based upon pranking and appropriation. The pranks of the Barbie Liberation Organization, which switched the voice recordings of commercially distributed Barbies and G.I. Joes in 1989, and of the Biotic Baking Brigade, which carried out a series of high-profile pieings, as well as of the WTO-immitating Yes Men, are seen as useful interventions that multiply “the tools for contemporary media and consumer activists” (108). These lead, she argues, to the culture jams of appropriation artists. These are appropriations based upon theft and piracy, such as musical practices of sampling, or through deliberate copyright infringements. Harold’s analysis here is astute, as she notes that by perpetuating the notion of the artist as criminal outlaw, appropriation art “risks grounding its resistance in the very assumptions it seeks to undermine” (118). That is, while attempting to dismantle processes of capitalist ownership, appropriation artists rely upon that notion of ownership as something to subvert.
The final chapter of OurSpace deals with Harold’s notion of kairos – as opposed to chronos – in order to promote a reinvigorated notion of the commons. Kairos is a Greek term for time that refers to an opportune moment that is situated in-between moments of chronos or linear time. Advocating the seizure of “kairotic moments” in order to open up the commons, Harold focuses upon open source coding like that of the Linux operating system as a means of generating cultural content in the future, looking at projects like the Creative Commons’ reconfigurations of copyright. While her notion of kairos could be clearer, this provocative section finds cause to celebrate some of the practices that animate the counter-corporate work being done today. While advocates of culture jamming, situationism, appropriation, and sampling may feel hard done by in Harold’s analysis, the folks over at Creative Commons should be warmed by her endorsement. I think that her critiques of counter-cultural practices are all entirely fair, although I was less sure about this final section. If appropriation artists are to be dismissed because they reify a notion of culture as property, why does Creative Commons – which, Harold claims, does not upset the notion of ownership, but, rather seeks to make it more specific – not receive the same critique? Arriving at a sort of counter-discursive “best practice” in the logic of open source opens Harold up to critique.
I did, also, find myself pausing over the manner in which Harold constructs culture as, essentially, a Deleuzian espace lisse. While she is primarily concerned with the United States – especially in later chapters, where U.S. American copyright issues move to the fore – she works across many borders, with May ’68 serving as only one example. An omission that falls somewhat outside her analysis results when considering the role of Canada. This is not only a happenstance consideration, although I notice it because I am Canadian. But much of this book deals with Canadian materials: Naomi Klein, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter – Harold’s foils – are all Canadians. Adbusters magazine and its founder Kalle Lasn are based in Vancouver. I found myself wondering, at least early on, whether Canada maintains an implicitly privileged position in conducting cultural critiques of the United States because of what Jameson once called its “semi-peripheral” resonance. Harold’s work is not concerned with questions of the nation under globalization – she dismisses the nation as being important only in a regulatory sense today – so this consideration falls outside of her analysis.
Writing such a book, moreover, has its attendant risks from other critics: while Harold critiques notions of copyright in her final chapter, arguing in favour of the specific processes of copy protection advocated by Creative Commons, her book is, of course, a piece of intellectual property. In itself, this is a mundane thing upon which to comment. Harold is an academic who is trying here to secure herself a space within a precarious academic environment; OurSpace is published by an academic press (the excellent University of Minnesota Press), and the usual norms apply. The irony is surely not lost on her; it is, rather, something that any self-conscious author juggles. This has not stopped others, however, from questioning her work, and for at least one internet commentator to blithely call for a “action” on her publisher for imposing copyright. Activist work and academia, as ever, maintain an awkward relationship with one another. Harold’s negotiations are successful – but her readers will want her book to be more things than it is, from anti-capitalist manifesto to counter-ownership argument for the commons. Her arguments in favour of managed copyright and against a Habermasian notion of the commons – with its nostalgia for an “outside”– show a more nuanced take.
References
Harold, Christine. OurSpace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000.
Heath, Joseph, and Andrew Potter. The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can’t Be Jammed. Toronto: HarperCollins, 2004.
Klein, Naomi. No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. Toronto: Knopf, 2000.
---. The Shock Doctrine. Toronto: Knopf, 2007.
Kit Dobson is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph. He holds degrees from the universities of Victoria (Canada), York (U.K.), and Toronto.
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