The transformation of the riot into a ditty, into a jingle, replicates, through a desacralizing and irreverent irony, the seductive power of the technical languages of the consumerist aesthetics cultivated by lyrical/elegiac poets. It is a seductiveness worthy of a song by Jalisse (stiffened by rigor mortis), pushing their market-oriented allure (business or marketing art) to the extreme, until the lyrical language implodes into ordinary language. We are like Roy Lichtenstein: replacing pop with Pop Art, and replacing Switzerland, in its protection of banking secrecy, in favor of the tax-evading beneficiary of Italian art. Through the riot, then, the (fake) reader will understand that the Mondadori lyrical/elegiac poets, the lyrical/elegiac authors of newspaper cultural inserts (the supreme example of despicable anti-/cultural writing)—such as those in La Repubblica, La Stampa, Avvenire, or Il Messaggero—democristiani in spirit and co-optative in practice, are saying nothing of significance, collectively transferring themselves into the late-modern condition. At that point the reader will be forced to construct a new socio-ethno-anthropological cartography, without the protective cage of “canon” and “tradition.” Hijacking has been defined—more in a modernist key, by Douglas B. Holt as “[…] turning expressions of the capitalist system and its media culture against itself […]” (Cultural Strategy: Using Innovative Ideologies to Build Breakthrough Brands, Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 252). Our task is to radicalize and redirect, like a hand grenade, the seductive force of modernism, causing its implosion/explosion. The praxeology of hijacking, born from the Situationist blague, and -through punk actions- arriving at late-twentieth-century culture jamming (accompanied by guerrilla communication), finds its legacy in the millennial neo-avant-gardes and in their anti-consumerist hijacking. Late modernism shifts the strategy: it acts upon the counter-strategy of the consumerist structure of recuperation (through the labelling approach of the dissonant or deformed) and shifts, through a behavioral-change counterattack, by means of the dédoublement of the artist (in the sense articulated by Paul de Man) and the Šklovskian ostranenie of the (fake) reader (after Viktor Shklovsky), from a mere attack on the brand to the entire technical language of aesthetic marketing, fostering “shock, shame, fear, and anger” (Erika Summers‑Effler, The Micro Potential for Social Change: Emotion, Consciousness, and Social Movement Formation, Sociological Theory, 20/1, 2002, pp. 41–60). Artistic boycott and sabotage are accompanied by retaliatory actions (legal consequences), modeled on the anachronistic activism of monochrom or CrimethInc. Mark Dery traces the origins of culture jamming back to the medieval carnival, which Mikhail Bakhtin interpreted, in his reading of François Rabelais, as an officially sanctioned subversion of social structuring. Thus late modernism regards as central to its praxis: hijacking, dédoublement, ostranenie, carnivalization, and Lucianic humor/irony (after Lucian of Samosata). The risk, however, would be the creation of a new late-modern “experimental” aesthetic ontology, one far removed from the political science and sociology of art, and from the militant activism of the Kolektivne NSEAE.
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Ivan Pozzoni
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