This week topic is Self. Gov II: Resistance is Fertile, and I’ve chosen the reading written by Matthew Soar, “The First things First Manifesto and the politics of culture jamming: towards a cultural economy of graphic design and advertising” to present this week topic.
We are living in world considered to be soaked in massive advertisements and media graphic images. It has been long claimed that ‘advertising and design are readily distinguishable from other economic institutions because of their declared expertise in creating specially cultural forms of communication.’ Graphic designers, however, are act as cultural intermediaries and play an important role in ‘lending traction to the contemporary routines of capital accumulation by articulating values and tastes to the promotion, in particular, selling of ideas and events, services and products’. However, it’s all becomes way consumer capitalism and commercialism. In Matthew Soar’s article, he investigates the “The First Things First Manifesto” as ‘a call for social responsibility’ of the graphic design professionals in creating media images as well as identifying their professional as ‘potent agents of positive social change’ which aims to resist the production of “junk”,– badly conceived and executed design work, and “Culture Jamming” as the act of transforming existing mass media to produce political, and most likely negative commentary about itself.
In respect to the dominant of media images becomes overwhelming and people are becoming less aware of the mechanism and manipulation of advertising, ‘The First Thing First Manifesto’ is something of a mission statement signed by famous designers, art directors first conceived in 1964 and updated version re-released in 1999, which recognizes the power of graphic design and argues for a politically responsible use of certain graphic design talents not just for selling things. Culture Jamming, indeed, is a resistance movement (to the perceived hegemony of popular culture) or subversion of dominant visual media (which already exist) through parody. Matthew Soar mentions about “Ad-busting” in his article which is considered to emerge from culture jamming to look at in terms of the ethical practice of graphic designers in 21st century and rather than just having advertising as a means of selling something to people. Since advertising is recognized as a really powerful tool to convey messages and influence people making decision, and thus it is thought in the ‘First Thing First‘, graphic designers may also use that tool to affect some sort of political change.
However, some of the designers like Glaser and Helfand do feel that ‘the degree that (the manifesto) has any impact on culture at large is not so certain’ and ‘designer per se are usually in a very weak position in regard to what they do’ since they ‘don’t make the determinations’ and ‘decides what is to be sold or the strategy’ and it’s hard to define about 'the potential harm or good’ they can effect through their work practice.
So here raise an important question: Isn’t it the case that culture jamming like Adbusting is reactive rather than proactive? That means iwhen they don’t initiate things but rather wait for something to happen and react to it, which is something already are exist. Does it matter that they don’t have the power to be proactive or to make a statement on their own?
Reference:
Soar, Matthew. “The First things First Manifesto and the politics of culture jamming: towards a cultural economy of graphic design and advertising.”Cultural Studies 16.4 (2002): 570-92
Leaver, Tama. “Self. Gov II: Resistance is Fertile.” Self.Net Lecture 9. University of Western Australia. Apr. 20, 2006
