Semiotic Disobedience: Shit-Disturbers in an Age of Image

OverloadA Digital Report From

The Counter-Publics Working Group

Daniel Drache, Senior Research Fellow and Associate Director

Alexandra Samur, Research Associate

Please Send Comments to drache@yorku.caSeptember 2006

EyeConics

In an age of image-overload, signs and symbols serve to confuse and distract, lulling us into a submissive trance Marshall McLuhan blamed on mass culture.

In contrast to the individuals without agency in McLuhan’s texts, when shit happens, ordinary people—whether skeptics or contrarians—engage in symbolic acts of rebellion.

An American law professor coined the term semiotic disobedience to describe a form of citizen engagement that transcends geographic borders and copyright laws.

The original definition of “semiotic disobedience” focused on acts of sabotage, where commercial messages were “jammed” or scrambled, imposing oppositional meanings by manipulating text and images.

Semiotic disobedience is rooted in semiotics—the study of signs and symbols. With the rise of post-modernism in the 1960s, French semioticians Barthes and Baudrillard showed that a text can be read in multiple ways. This seminal idea has empowered those at the margins to appropriate text for socially-directed ends. As the image below demonstrates, in the metaphorical kingdom of the blind, creative thinking is power and vision.

The original semiotic rebels were Guy Debord and Situationist International (SI), who formed a political movement active in 1960s France. These early movers and shakers thought up practical ways to transcend the spectacle of mass culture, using acts of détournement in which an image, statement, or action was removed from its context and given new meaning in order to move consumers from “distraction to action.”

The staying power behind the Reformes Chloroforme image lies in its simple layout and direct message, using few words to speak volumes in protest of social issues of the time.

This clean and powerful aesthetic defines SI’s political art and gives it its punch.

Inspired by SI’s success, San Francisco’s Billboard Liberation Front and Melbourne’s BUGA UP targeted large-format tobacco ads in the 1970s. These early billboard bandits helped catalyze the anti-smoking movement, later leading to the massive class-action lawsuits against Big Tobacco in the 1990s.

These coordinated acts of defiance sowed revolutionary ways of thinking about smoking. Though tobacco companies were still making billions, they were forced to change the way they sold cigarettes. What’s more, millions have now butted out.

Signs and symbols create unconscious reflexes and point us in a particular direction, we are forced to interpret images everyday. It’s not the gin but mindless devotion to the brand that fucKs you up.

For the skeptic to navigate an inflated economy of signs and symbols, different types of reading are required. Semiotic disobedience encourages radical semiotic interpretation, focusing on consumer “talk back” to the codes of advertising. Millions are now talking back and getting in the face of authority.

Building on early sabotage techniques, today increasingly affordable and powerful digital technologies like portable computers, photo-editing software and digital printers enhance a horizontal DIY production ethic. Self-taught “pro-sumers” are now empowered to manipulate icons and optics to make their point.

Semiotic disobedients aim to diss corporate advertising, defy authority, and create discursive noise by digitally creating their own ads at home rather than sabotaging and altering existing ones covertly in the dead of night.

Through their actions, an ad for a pair of khakis is transformed from a fashion trend into a symbol of racial hatred.

Mimicking advertising techniques targeting children, the Adbusters Media Foundation popularized “culture jamming” in Canada.

With “subvertisements” as their calling card, Adbusters’ slick designs work to undermine the authority of brands, like Nike.

Adbusters’ depiction of Tiger Woods portrays him not as an athlete but a commodified and packaged product, bought by millions of dollars in endorsement deals.

Semiotic disobedients work to ‘uncool the cool,’ using all means possible. Any part of the body can become a living billboard to shock the young, hip and the disaffected in order to create awareness of the powerful effects of advertising.

Semiotic rebels splice subtle but shocking political messages into images that at first seem familiar. We may not recognize that a woman’s body in an ad is being falsified, objectified, commodified and demeaned until we look beyond the popular logo.

These urban guerrillas want to shock the public and create a new political discourse that is supportive of “the personal is political.”

As media authorship tools have been massified, more consumers are learning a language once only accessible to elites. Yet, not all experiments with this language are successful: online, absurd images void of intelligible meaning are more prevalent than politically insightful creations.

Some cases of in-your-face brandalism have led to legal action. Artist and semiotic disobedient Kieron Dwyer landed in hot water with US giant Starbucks when he created a parody of the Starbucks logo targeting rampant consumerism.

Today, acts of semiotic disobedience reflect an international cosmopolitanism drawing consumers into a world of shared, public meanings. These extend beyond brandalism, aiming “to create dialogue where there isn’t one” about any issue of the day. It’s about networking, building cultures of resistance, and individual acts of defiance.

For example, the Abu Ghraib icon synonymous with the atrocities of the US invasion of Iraq has been the subject of recent semiotic resistance.

What unites semiotic resisters is common utopic vision—defying a larger system.

These semiotic rebels are part of a larger global justice movement, continuing to forge a unique culture of resistance that is constantly being reshaped and reimagined. Such creativity produces critical illuminations for a world desperately seeking to create new geographies of power, talk-back and dissent.