Barbelith Underground > Conversation

Some things to think about:

1. Even in the book No Logo, Naomi Klein expresses doubts about the idea of 'culture jamming', etc. She points out that whenever anyone watches television, they are presenting with a series of contradictory messages with conflicting tones and meanings - we skip from a news report on the dangers of climate change to an advert for a new car, or we skip from a documentary on the problems of capitalism to a rock video - and these discontinuities do not necessarily cause any of us to question our perception of the world around us.

2. Since Klein wrote that, mainstream popular culture has gone through what some might call a 'paradigm shift' - these occur quite regularly and usually involve ideas from the fringes of culture moving into the centre, blah blah blah. The most obvious example of this is obviously the cultural juggernaut that is The Matrix movie, its terrible sequels and other spin-offs, but there are plenty of others. The most telltale indication that Disinfo culture has become mainstream is surely The Adam and Joe Show's parody of the same, cyber-collectively "wooooh, messing with your minds!" Equally, in the world of advertising, ideas about 'guerilla marketing' are more than current (they're almost a bit past it now!). Go into the toilets of many a London bar and you can't tell the 'subversive' stickers from the ones trying to sell you something. So how does scrawling something on a toilet wall or sticking up a sticker remain subversive? (Answer: it has to be something really fucking special.)

3. What do we really mean when we talk about messing with people's heads - what beliefs do we want them to question, and what do we want them to start thinking about instead? There's often a patronising misconception that there are baseline, mundane 'humatons', and then switched-on, clever, alternative people. Whereas in fact people tend to be a little more complicated than that. There are fierce environmentalists who have no interest in other forms of politics; there are people who lobby for political change who have no interest in outsider music or art; there are people working to promote outsider art who might seem utterly conservative in any other way... My biggest problem with the idea of a 'mindfuck' is that nobody who proposes one ever seems to want to expend the effort necessary to specify which preconceived ideas they want to mess with, who holds them, how this process will work, or why it should be done.

4. Hakim Bey in his piece 'Poetic Terrorism' said this: "The audience reaction or aesthetic-shock produced by PT ought to be at least as strong as the emotion of terror-- powerful disgust, sexual arousal, superstitious awe, sudden intuitive breakthrough, dada-esque angst" - and if it doesn't do that, it's a pointless failure. In other words, it can never be simply wacky or zany.

5. In the context of the above, anyone who thinks that an illustration of "a penis gently penetrating between the sensual folds of a human cerebral cortex" is in any way 'subversive' needs... well I don't know what they need. I suppose they need their preconceived ideas to be challenged a little, at the very least.

Operation: Mindfuck