We're All Borf In the End

At the other end of the magazine spectrum is the international publication Adbusters. Achingly hip, painstakingly designed and printed on recycled paper, Adbusters is the flagship magazine of the counterculture movement, such as it is. The Adbusters manifesto states the magazine's purpose boldly: "We're the ragtag remnants of oppositional culture -- what's left of the revolutionary impulse in the jaded fin de millennium atmosphere of post-modernity in which revolution is said to no longer be possible. What we share is an overwhelming rage against consumer capitalism and a vague sense that our time has come to act as a vague collective force."

So there you have it -- I bet you never thought defining a generation was so easy! Seriously, though, this is about as close as anyone gets to saying what culture jammers are all about.

The idea of the collective is one that has always captured the imagination of young people -- remember all those '60s communes? The most fertile ground for collectivism today is the Internet, where identity is automatically annulled. Anonymity allows collective projects to flourish with no individual gain, only collective gain. The collectivist writing project Everything2.com is run by people you may never meet or talk to, and who specialize in creating fiction or journalism. One user, identified only as "loquacious," puts the collectivist ideal this way; "[The site] is the way the internet was supposed to be. [It] is a reference collection, a novel that writes itself, poetry that reads itself, and the shiny toy that never grows dull. It is the potential to exceed the sum of its parts." As such, it's a project that will always slip away from any effort to capture it.

"Grown-ups are obsolete"; "Teenagers are Invincible"; "Andre the Giant has a Posse." It's heady, apocalyptic, meaningless even. You can probably sense here that I'm struggling to say what it is that I mean, but that's precisely because the movement, such as it is, is undefinable.

This idea of slippery collective identity is nothing new -- in Italy it dates back to 1994, when a band of disaffected youth chose to call themselves Luther Blissett, assuming the name of a former soccer player. In the words of one of the Blissetts: "The group considers identity to be the prison of the self."

The Blissett phenomenon acquired a certain notoriety in 1997 when four "Blissetts" were caught traveling on a train without a ticket. When asked about this in court, the four replied that "a collective identity does not travel with a ticket." They were acquitted. (The soccer-playing Ur-Mr. Blissett, though bemused, appears not to have cared. "It's rather funny," he said, "but I don't mind these people using my name -- whoever they are.")

In attempting to do the impossible and define for you this enormously earnest brand of collectivism, I feel both ambivalence and sadness. Like any fringe movement, culture jamming rests upon its politically oppositional nature. Culture jammers are caught -- on the one hand dissatisfied and willing for change to happen, but on the other depending for their existence on the status quo's never changing. Of course, the people who can afford Adbusters at $8 a pop are the very people who don't need the "liberation" from conventional culture that they so sincerely advocate. And who needs the pseudo-babble of such hardcore identity anarchists as the Blissetts?

Saying that his goal was to "show the public how to fight a dishonest media" one Blissett claimed: "We are a collective ghost -- a myth which finds reality in those who take part." Frankly, this makes me run for cover -- it's glib, and its heady intellectual detachment is about the least appealing mask a movement can wear. I far prefer the end of the Adbusters manifesto: "At the simplest level we are a growing band of people who have given up on the American Dream." Until we can find our own vision to aspire to, maybe Borf and Andre the Giant are all we have.

Author's e-mail:claude.willan@gmail.com

Claude Willan came across Borf while visiting the United States. He is a student at Oxford University, where he is studying English literature.