Rebecca Walker
The art of “pulling tricks” involves a sense of the opportunities afforded by a particular occasion. . . . A tactic boldly juxtaposes diverse elements in order to suddenly produce a flash shedding a different light on the language of a place and to strike the hearer.
—Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (emphasis added)
When I was six, my big brother pulled a nasty trick on me. He was ten, and this trick of his stands out in my memory for its cunning, danger, and illumination of his character. Up until this point, I had always trusted my big brother implicitly, viewing him as my personal teacher: a wise sharer of secrets and purveyor of real, capital “T” Truth. Using this belief to his advantage, on one particular spring day when my mother was out of the house and my father otherwise occupied in the den, my brother convinced me to climb inside our 1970s, avocado-green Hotpoint-style dryer and take a ride. He did so by proclaiming, “It’s just like a roller coaster.”
After a very short, noisy, and painful ride in the dryer, I emerged, crestfallen and suspicious. Was the dryer really like a roller coaster ride? If so, it certainly failed to meet my expectations. Had my brother lied to me? This seemed more likely; however, his reasons for doing so made no sense to my small mind. Why put me in the dryer? Did he desire to hurt me? Did he simply want to see what would happen? Or was it the pleasure of pulling one over on me, of accomplishing one of his first tricks?
A good trick, as Michel de Certeau (1984) notes, relies upon seizing unique opportunities afforded by specific occasions. In the case of my brother, his trick relied upon the convergence of three separate circumstances: my mother’s absence from the house, my blind faith in whatever he said, and a recent family trip to a theme park with roller coasters where, unlike my brother, I had been too terrified to take a ride. Realizing the unique opportunity afforded by such a convergence, my brother jumped upon the chance to pull one over on his sister. What he failed to foresee was the enlightenment such a trick produced in my young self. In a flash, I realized my brother could not always be trusted and that his motivations were not necessarily benevolent. Such a realization did indeed, as de Certeau suggests, shed a different light on the situation.
Flash mobs are essentially choreographed group tricks. Whether created as complex communal in-jokes or taking the form of a cultural critique, flash mobs act as elaborate pranks played out within the quasi-public realm of the capitalist city, exposing its heretofore unrealized methods of operation. These methods of operation—both of the capitalist city and of the flash mob—are the focus of this chapter. Throughout, I consider new, hybridized forms of the flash mob which act as culture jams, refashioning popular cultural forms such as song and dance into guerrilla forms of performance, which highlight the shrinking nature of public space. I examine these political, hybridized types of flash mobs to outline the flash mob’s strategic methods for operating as an act of culture jamming and performative resistance.
In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau (1984) discusses possibilities for creative work within a highly structured capitalist society. According to de Certeau, capitalism casts individuals in roles of consumers of merchandise or as employee-workers producing goods for sale. Within such a system, one might feel the absence of any space for truly creative endeavors—those undertaken without a monetary profit in mind. As de Certeau suggests, however, such spaces for creativity do exist, primarily within the ways we refashion and remodel the remains of capital, as well as in the items we purchase.
This hidden poeisis1 outlined by de Certeau recalls not only the Situationists’ practice of détournement,2 but also the modern hipster’s cultural aesthetic—reclamations of old, existing products of a capitalist system, remade into symbols of fashionable youth culture: trucker hats, Parliament cigarettes, and Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. De Certeau was right: as capitalism’s control over society and social space grew, it did not manage to wipe out, sterilize, or stratify creative endeavors by turning everything into an object for purchase. Rather, people simply changed tactics, operating within the system as well as without, disguising themselves behind the wigs of ordinary conspicuous consumption and production.3 I contend that the flash mob is one such endeavor.
Rather than remaking an object, though, flash mobs refashion both the spaces of capitalism as well as its structures, if only for a moment. The flash mob reveals the sometimes hidden power relations inherent in the capitalist model, through its tactical takeovers and makeovers of capitalism’s pseudo-public space. I argue that flash mobs are a type of performative resistance to what Michel Foucault (2000a) labels governmentality, or the conduct of the conduct of others. This resistance occurs within what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1989) call a control society, a world in which we are never truly finished with anything, but rather perpetually training and testing ourselves.4 I construct this argument in three parts, focusing first on the specific tactics of the flash mob as a form of resistance, followed by a discussion of surveillance and visibility, and ending by outlining the makeup and power relations of the flash mob.
September 26, 2009. Protestors angered by Whole Foods CEO John Mackey’s statements regarding the national health care bill—mainly that health care, in Mackey’s opinion, was no more an intrinsic right than food or shelter—gather in a park outside Oakland to rehearse a song and dance version of Toni Basil’s 1980s pop tune “Hey Mickey.” The words of the song have been tweaked, and this new version, “Hey Mackey,” calls out the CEO for his stance on the health care bill with lyrics like, “Oh Mackey you’re a swine, / You’re a swine you blow my mind, / Hey Mackey.” The group included amateur musicians creating a sort of de facto marching band as well as other singing and dancing participants. After a few hours of practice, the group heads over to a local Whole Foods and poses as shoppers until the opportune moment arrives. At this point, the band plays, and mobbers gather alongside frozen foods to perform their new version of “Hey Mackey.” A security guard calls the police, but the mobbers succeed in performing two rounds of their song before exiting the store and thereby escaping arrest. Apparently, according to protestors, their actions were “inspired by their conservative counterparts who have been dramatizing the health care debate” (Preuitt 2009, par. 10).
August 14, 2010. Frustrated Seattle residents surprise employees and shoppers at a local Target store around lunchtime with their own makeshift band and dancers, performing a rewritten version of Depeche Mode’s “People Are People.” In the new version, the lyrics ask, “Target ain’t people so why should it be / Allowed to play around with our democracy?” The mob followed a call for a Target boycott by MoveOn.org, a left-leaning political website. Earlier in 2010 the Supreme Court had ruled that corporations could donate unlimited amounts to political campaigns, and in July Target donated $150,000 to Minnesota gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer, an anti-labor and outspoken anti–gay marriage Republican. These Seattle flash mobbers, inspired by the MoveOn.org boycott, were members of AGIT-POP Communications, a “subvertising agency” offering “cutting edge videos, widgets, and boots-on-the-ground guerilla marketing to progressive campaigns” (Boyd and Sellers 2010, under “Tune in, turn on, agitate”).
November 24, 2010. Dr. Etienne Lantier and several of his “students” swarm Lloyds Bank on High Borough Street in London. While bank tellers and other employees look on, Lantier stands before a makeshift cardboard lectern with a banner reading “The University for Strategic Optimism” and a sign stating “five-minute lecture” and delivers a lecture outlining the university’s principles of free and open education, a return of politics to the public, and the politicization of public space (UfSOLondon 2010a). Although they encounter resistance from bank employees, who ask them to leave before they call the police, Dr. Lantier and his students continue until the five-minute lecture is finished, at which point they leave the site. A few days later, on November 30, the second lecture of the University for Strategic Optimism is delivered by Dr. Dora Kaliayev, standing before a similar cardboard lectern in the aisles of Tesco Superstore, a local supermarket chain, on Old Kent Road (UfSOLondon 2010b).
Each of these mobs represents a new offspring and/or hybridized version of the flash mob. Unique for their use of the flash mob formula (organized online, swarming of a site, short time period) as well as for their fusion of multiple flash mob formats—song, dance, and overt politics—these performances are inevitable products of the flash mob’s popularity and proliferation since the form’s debut in 2003. That year, writer and cultural critic Bill Wasik stunned the world with his newest experiment, the MOB Project, which flooded the streets of New York City with strange performances, which were quickly labeled “flash mobs” by participants and local media. The typical flash mob begins when a person acting as an organizer (usually using a false name to protect identity) sends e-mails or text messages to a list of people, inviting them to arrive at a specific place at a certain time and to wait for further instructions. This anonymous organizer serves as the catalyzing force behind the creation of the mob and often invents a set of actions for the mob to perform on-site. However, the organizer of a flash mob should not be viewed as its leader, since her desires are often usurped, her initial list of addressees expands beyond her control, and her anonymity is maintained. The number of mob participants grows exponentially as each recipient forwards the invitation to his own electronically stored lists of friends and acquaintances. Usually, upon arrival, participants are given instructions on fliers detailing what they should do during the flash mob. As a rule, flash mobs tend to last no longer than ten minutes (Wasik 2006, 66). Participants arrive at a site, perform their action(s), and then leave, often just before the police arrive. These actions range from shopping en masse for a rug to pointing at a fast food menu and mooing like cows to pretending to stand in line for concert tickets (Johnson 2003; Wasik 2006).
In the ten years since Wasik’s flash mobs burst onto the scene, use of this new form and/or method of performance expanded and matured. Today we see many different kinds of flash mobs: zombie mobs, game mobs, freezes, dance mobs, musical mobs, political mobs, techno mobs, and hybrid mobs (some combination of these other forms). My labels for these new types of flash mobs, although imperfect, focus on the qualitative changes each type made to Wasik’s original flash mob formula (such as dressing up like a zombie or singing a song). I mention them here only to highlight that this article focuses on a specific kind of flash mob—one with an overt political message—and that my arguments about these types of flash mobs acting as culture jammers may not apply to all flash mobs, particularly those created by corporations to sell products.
What does a flash mob resist? Traditionally, flash mobs espouse no political or social agenda. However, as the flash mob format expanded over the past eleven years, many new hybridized forms emerged to promote particular political and/or social agendas, such as free public education or a boycott of the Target Corporation. The overt goals of such flash mobs as acts of resistance are easily ascertained. Additionally, flash mobs work against what Foucault (2000a) calls governmentality, or the management of others’ behavior (324).
The aim of the flash mob is to upset and unmask the power structures that operate in our daily lives. For Foucault (2000b), governmentality presents itself in those unspoken laws of normative behavior that prevent us from singing at work or dancing in the classroom. Deleuze (1990) extended this idea with his conception of the control society, a world in which we are never done with examination and training, but rather always measuring ourselves and being measured against one norm or another. For example, every morning when I log on to my computer and my homepage website appears, so do two or three articles outlining six to ten strategies for how I can better communicate with my boss, make myself attractive to the opposite sex, and avoid those holiday calories. These articles work off assumptions about ideal norms for physical appearance, attractive behavior, and assertive communication strategies. As such, they operate as reminders of the rules of normative behavior, communication, and appearance that media, society, teachers, family, and friends shared and instructed me in since birth, in a type of ordering regime. Ultimately, the pressure to live up to these ideals, as well as the onslaught of surveillance and other disciplinary measures, creates an unconscious acceptance or docility within most people. I might not always have enough time or money to put on makeup, shave my legs and armpits, get a manicure and pedicure, go to the gym, cut and color my hair, and on and on—but I rarely question whether I want to or should do these things. After all, such pressures and desires are only normal. Flash mobs seek to transgress against and expose this form of control—this conduct of our conduct. In a flash mob, participants break the norms of acceptable behavior and by doing so perform the dual function of (1) waking up their own participant bodies to the idea that other options for behavior exist and (2) reminding the audience of the mob of the absurd and arbitrary nature of so-called “normal” behavior. To say it differently, the flash mob reminds us that we actually have a choice.
Still, mobs of any sort frighten the rulers of a control society, particularly those with an overt political or social agenda. One cannot account for individual behavior, or, once formed, control the cooperative will and desires of the mob. This lack of control over the mob’s behavior, however, affords the flash mob its unique and particular strength. To understand this strength, as well as its tactical nature, I return to the work of philosophers Deleuze and Guattari (1989).
In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari (1989) outline two types of, or orientations to, space: smooth space and striated space. While these are often misunderstood as designations for particular types of places existing in the world, the terms “smooth” and “striated” actually describe processes or methods of occupying space. Striated space exists when specific points or locations are designated and people are assigned to occupy them. It is thus the space of property, a measured space akin to a suburban home lot or an office cubicle. The authors use a chess game as an example—each piece has a particular spot from which it must start the game, as well as a particular set of rules pertaining to how the piece can be moved, which is related to its identity as defined by the game—a knight, a pawn, a queen. Conversely, smooth space is an open space such as the ocean or desert, where space is not owned or assigned but rather occupied. A person occupying smooth space is not assigned a particular position, but rather can show up at any time and at any point in the space. Deleuze and Guattari use the game “Go” as an example, in which the pieces themselves, unlike in chess, are not identifiable as distinct, separate units. Rather, they are small round pellets or disks that are uniform in nature and could represent a multitude of different subjectivities. Furthermore, although Go and chess are both games of battle and conquest, the battle in Go is not coded by specific rules regarding movement and function of the pieces; rather the object of the game is to use the pieces in such a way as to border, encircle, or shatter the opponent’s strategy. As Deleuze and Guattari state:
In Go, it is a question of arraying oneself in an open space, of holding space, of maintaining the possibility of springing up at any point: the movement is not from one point to another, but becomes perpetual, without aim or destination, without departure or arrival. The “smooth” space of Go, as against the “striated” space of chess. (353; emphasis added)
The authors also clarify the difference between movement and speed, as related to smooth and striated space. Thus, speed is an intensive property, found in the movements of a body or bodies in smooth space, whereas movement is an extensive quality operating in the traveling of a body from one point to another, within striated space (359–60). For example, one moves in particular, controlled patterns through the striated space of a planned garden. Even if a person moves very quickly through this space, she still does not have speed, according to Deleuze and Guattari. This is due to the fact that, typically, one moves throughout and occupies the space of a garden by traveling from point to point: turn right on this path, left on that lane, and so on. A person moving through a garden feels he is meant to occupy some parts of the space, such as the path, but not others, such as the grass or hedges. However, if a person were to treat the garden as an open space, like a field, and ignore those pathways, then that person may travel throughout the garden however she sees fit. Regardless of how quickly or slowly she moves, in fact, regardless of whether she moves at all, she still operates at a particular speed, one that allows her to spring up anywhere, at any time, moving, occupying, and even holding space. Speed and movement are applicable to both individual bodies and a multiplicity of bodies—such as the flash mob—and neither term contains a connotation of a faster or slower type of travel. Rather, the distinction regards the type of space traversed—smooth or striated—as well as the perception of the combined body traveling across it—that of a unified, collective whole, or that of a body consisting of irreducible parts, the multiplicity. The multiplicity moves in smooth space through the use of speed. The collective travels in striated space through movements from one point to another.
The body of the flash mob is a multiplicity, which realizes its potential during its formation in cyberspace—through e-mail and text messaging—and then actualizes that potential on the day of the mob at the mob site. The flash mob’s use of technology creates an instant mobilization mechanism that allows individuals to turn up at any time in space, thereby escaping—if only for the brief ten-minute time period of the mob—the striated or stratified space they are typically assigned to occupy. Stated differently, the flash mob swarms a site, arriving from multiple locations and points in space to occupy one particular space (the mob site), typically in a manner opposite of the normative codes of society. In this manner, the mob occupies a smooth space, existing in an intensive zone, whereas Deleuze and Guattari are quick to remind us, even the smallest change in speed—the slightest sort of movement—produces a qualitative change in the final, actualized production.
The Target and Whole Foods flash mobs mentioned earlier serve as excellent examples. In each mob, participants entered the store in an orderly fashion typical of striated space and began to move about the store as their assigned positions—that of customers—would dictate. They calmly roamed the aisles, looking at products; some even went so far as to pick up shopping baskets and carts and pretend to shop. However, when the prearranged moment/signal occurred, participants swarmed a particular spot in the store—the front of the store check-out area in the Target mob, the back of the store frozen food area in Whole Foods—arriving at random from multiple points and occupying the space in a manner atypical of the position of customer assigned to them in the store’s striated space: through the use of a song and dance performance. At this moment, the flash mob participants succeeded in creating a smooth space within which they moved at a particular speed, holding space as they saw fit. With the addition of a few significant changes (an overt political message and a previously learned song and dance routine) from Bill Wasik’s original flash mob formula (in and out in ten minutes, instructions handed out on-site, no overt message), the organizers and participants in the Target and Whole Foods flash mobs created a new form: a song and dance political flash mob. These changes alter both the mob’s purpose and effect, while retaining the mob’s act of resistance. In fact, they further the mob’s already disruptive act—its ability to turn tricks on an ever-present, always watching Big Brother—by using it to expose the oft-hidden actions and political investments of major corporations. In so doing, these new types of flash mobs become culture jams.
In fact, one might argue that flash mobs are the perfect platforms for culture jammers of the digital age, combining the power of live performance with the mass dissemination capabilities of the viral video. In the twelve years since Bill Wasik’s flash mobs first appeared on the streets of New York City, people worldwide used his formula to stage massive pillow fights, zombie crawls, surprise dance routines, and even renditions of Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus in shopping mall food courts. Many of these flash mobs referenced popular culture in some manner, but it is only recently, in the work of groups like the University for Strategic Optimism or Seattle’s AGIT-POP Communications, that we begin to see Wasik’s formula being used as a method for disseminating alternative, subversive messages about corporations and government policies. In the Target, Whole Foods, and UfSO mobs discussed in this article, we see Wasik’s flash mobs moving from indirect acts of resistance to direct acts of protest and advocacy.
Flash mobs, like all mobs, are uncontrollable beyond a certain point, which is part of both their danger and their appeal. The lack of external control (in favor of the pack mentality) acts as a fundamental part of the flash mob’s resistance to the complete control found in the daily exercise of governmentality. Two important facts remain to be discussed regarding the flash mob as a form of resistance. First, the flash mob is a form of resistance operating within the realm of discipline, not outside of it. Without disciplined bodies—that is, bodies used to answering calls and doing what they are told—the mob could not assemble into a large collective body. Second, the resistance found in the flash mob acts as a type of critical performance, which can be understood in terms of Judith Butler’s (1999) discussions of performativity. According to Butler, gender is a repeated performance we engage daily. In order to explore alternate possibilities, we must begin to repeat with a difference, to collect and explore all those moments when we slip up in our regular gender performances and find ourselves performing or acting in another manner.
Discipline, as a method, is based on repetitions, which over time produce docile and productive bodies. The flash mob uses these disciplined bodies to its advantage, asking them to repeat with a difference, to use their particular disciplined bodies in concert with other disciplined bodies as a way to act upon the disciplinary structure of society as a whole without stepping outside of its confines. In other words, it is the very ability to follow orders and take instruction that flash mob participants use to disrupt the order of everyday society. These disruptions are brief, involve no illegal behavior, and are carried out in relative anonymity, allowing participants to act out and badger Big Brother without fear of being caught and imprisoned. Flash mobs alter the scene, turning striated space to smooth space if only for a moment. These new acts of culture jamming confound the corporation machine, intrigue passersby, and deterritorialize behavioral norms. As such, flash mobs ultimately operate as artful tricks, seizing opportunities and shedding new light on the arbitrary and unspoken rules of behavior within particular places.
As products of the digital age, flash mobs require the use of e-mail and text message technology created in the latter part of the twentieth century. Every flash mob begins with a message announcing the date and time of the event, along with either a set of instructions for action or the promise of instructions to be delivered on site. Recipients then forward this message to others using computers and cell phones, forming the mob (or at least its virtual potential) with each successive e-mail or text message. Usually, upon arrival, participants are given instructions on flyers detailing what they should do during the flash mob. As a rule, the actions or performative interventions of flash mobs tend to last no longer than ten minutes (Wasik 2006, 66). Participants arrive at a site, perform their action(s), and then leave, often just before the police arrive. These actions are often suggested by the site of the mob and usually involve some sort of behavior atypical of the particular time and place, such as pretending to stand in line for concert tickets on the sidewalk outside of a church. The relationship between person and tool, or participant and computer/cell phone, allows for the origination of flash mobs as an assemblage, or merging of singular entities with a shared goal to create a new, composite body. Individuals and technology work together in this assemblage to create the virtual potential of the mob, in cyberspace, which is then actualized in material form at the mob site on the day of the performance.
The flash mob itself also forms an assemblage with what I would call the “corporation machine.” I offer an example and a few definitions to begin. First, the prison system offers the best example of the machinic assemblage. That is, one can view the prison system as a machine made up of multiple parts working together, a living, social semiotic; examples of these parts include a safe, well-constructed building, well-trained guards, well-behaved prisoners, and a desire within society to rehabilitate those prisoners. For Deleuze and Guattari (1989) every social machine operates on two levels: one of content and one of expression. In other words, when examining how a machine such as the prison functions, one must look at both the components of that machine (content) as well as the discourse surrounding it (expression). According to Deleuze and Guattari, these two levels of content and expression (both of which operate simultaneously) form a double articulation of stratification. The term “stratification” here is used in the sociological sense, to refer to a mode of division based on the rank, or hierarchy, within a particular category. For example, within our late capitalist society, caviar appears at a higher level, or layer, of strata than shrimp cocktail. Social machines such as the prison machine form a double articulation of stratification because each articulation—that of content and of expression—has a specific form and substance.5 Consequently, every social machine (such as the prison machine) contains a form of content and substance of content, as well as a form of expression and substance of expression. For instance, one can discuss the material makeup of a machine’s components as its substance of content, while also discussing the way those components are organized/arranged as the machine’s form of content.
Deleuze and Guattari (1989) argue that behind every machinic assemblage, such as the corporation machine or the prison machine, lies an abstract machine seeking to find a function for the matter with which it is concerned—a pack of human bodies (71). The prison machine’s function is to discipline those individual bodies, to render them docile and therefore useful to those in power (the warden, the state, or any other sort of Big Brother). That is to say, it is abstract machines, always concerned with finding functions for human bodies, which lead to the creation of social machines like the prison or corporation.
To study the flash mob, I focus on the corporation machine. In this type of machinic assemblage, the substance of content would be the consumers of the various products it produces, and the form of content would be the particular store or marketplace in which those products are sold. The scientific study of consumption (including advertising and marketing) is the overwhelmingly privileged form of expression in the corporation machine, which is normative and rule-based. The substance of expression, therefore, would be the corporation. Just as the layout of a particular store (form of content) controls the manner in which consumers (substance of content) move and interact, the scientific study of consumption (form of expression) shapes the way our society views and relates to the corporation (substance of expression). The flash mob joins with the corporation machine to create a new assemblage, one that substitutes flash mobbers for consumers and offers a new form of expression (what Deleuze and Guattari [1989] refer to as a potential “line of flight”) that differs from the previously mentioned form of expression—the scientific study of consumption based on advertising and marketing. In other words, when culture jamming flash mobs swarm a store and perform within it instead of shopping within it, they force a discussion of corporations (particularly the corporation that owns the store) that is about something other than advertising and marketing. This line of flight serves as an experimental pathway of deterritorialization, or a change in habit, allowing participants and audiences to explore alternate possibilities for personal expression emergent in their daily lives and actions.
Deterritorialization usually occurs as the result of some sort of intensification or crisis that triggers a break in our regular habits of behavior. A person’s typical morning routine can be thought of as a territorialization, or set of habits: wake up, make coffee, feed the pet, read the paper, shower, and dress. An act as simple as changing this routine can be thought of as a deterritorialization, perhaps due to that person’s recent discovery of Buddhist practice: wake up, make coffee, feed the pet, meditate for ten minutes, shower, and dress. Such a simple change can affect our perception and encounters throughout the day, therefore opening us up to new possibilities of connection. In addition, if we adopt this new routine and habitually begin to enact it each morning, a reterritorialization will occur. In the flash mob, the behavioral norms of conspicuous consumption are deterritorialized into new forms of expression. I return to the lectures of the University of Strategic Optimism (UfSO), described earlier, as an example.
In the UfSO’s first lecture, held at a small Lloyds Bank office, twenty to thirty students easily swarmed the site, filling the small waiting area and successfully occupying it for five minutes while Dr. Lantier gave his lecture. Such behavior is atypical of that usually found in the modern bank office. When a customer arrives at a bank, she calmly waits in line, brings her business to a cashier sitting behind a counter, transacts that business, and leaves. This is the standard form of expression one finds in a bank, and the docility of a customer’s behavior is typical of the capitalist marketplace in general. Sitting, standing, or loitering at will, as well as lecturing to a large crowd, are behaviors atypical of the average bank. Rather, one expects to find such behavior in a university classroom, where students gather to hear the words of their professor. By taking the behaviors typical (or habitual) of the school environment and making them the behaviors of the bank, participants in the UfSO mob successfully deterritorialized their traditional form of expression—docile transaction of capital—and replaced it with a playful act of education. Through this act of deterritorialization, the flash mob participants make themselves and any other customers who happen to be in or around the bank at the time of the mob aware of the unspoken rules or codes of normative behavior, enacting an alternative promotional campaign that highlights the possibilities lying beyond those normative boundaries (de Certeau’s [1984] “flash,” which sheds a new light on the language of a place).
Furthermore, the timing and strategic choice of locations for the UfSO’s first two lectures—at a bank and a supermarket—highlight the parodic and counterhegemonic nature of their flash mobs. In essence, the University for Strategic Optimism, in its reclamation of public space for politics, seems to be stating that if the United Kingdom is going to prevent equal access to public education through its upcoming tuition hikes, then they (the University for Strategic Optimism) will fix this problem by offering their own lectures in the marketplace for free. In so doing—and with every obstacle they encounter from retailers, police, and employees—these political flash mobbers indicate the lack of truly public space (or public markets), as opposed to privately owned public space (or market space) in modern society. Unlike Bill Wasik’s original flash mobs that only made visible such truths, these flash mobs overtly fight back and seek to reclaim such spaces. Wasik’s 2003 mobs highlighted the lack of public space within New York City by causing alarm and often bringing out the police just for showing up in these spaces with a large group of people and doing something abnormal, but not illegal. The UfSO mobbers went one step further by explicitly protesting the lack of public space through the rhetorical act of their lectures, given while occupying privately owned public space.
Not surprisingly, the machines—whose hegemonic, normative forms of expression the flash mob dissects and interrogates—do not usually welcome such deterritorializations. Typically, the actions of the participants are seen as dangerous enough to prompt bank or store employees and managers to call the police or other authorities, who often arrive just as the mob participants are leaving. Acts of deterritorialization are threatening to those who could potentially lose power or profits were such behaviors to catch on in the population as a whole, especially if their customers were bothered enough by the mob to leave. Therefore, social machines like the corporation machine typically feel an immediate need to reterritorialize and thereby reassert their power when such actions take place. Multiple strategies exist for such reassertions (see also chapter 24 of this volume).
While multiple levels of power relations operate in the flash mob, the relationship between the flash mob and the corporation machine (which owns the site upon which the mob acts) often dominates media coverage. After all, these individuals (employees) must decide what to do: laugh, join in, call the police, or run and hide. Their decisions are usually the decisions not of an individual, but of the machinic assemblage to which they belong. Stated differently, employees at the site of a flash mob typically ask themselves, “What would my employer do?” not “What would I do?” Calling the police, however, is not the corporation machine’s only alternative, as evidenced in the historical record of the flash mob.
Another strategy is that of cooptation: stealing the deterritorializing tactics of the aberrant, diverse, and disparate population in the flash mob and using them to reterritorialize a preferred set of actions—that of conspicuous consumption—as well as to redefine the population in a unified manner. In 2005, in an effort to regain and reassert power lost to the flash mob, the corporation machine undertook both these goals. Bill Wasik (2006) recounts how in the summer of 2005 Ford Motor Company sought to coopt the tactics and techniques of the flash mob in an effort to appeal to its newest targeted customer: the coveted twenty to thirty-something hipster crowd, whose preferences dominate trends in conspicuous consumption. Ford wanted to promote its newest product—the Ford Fusion—to this group of individuals and thought the flash mob the best way to do so. Ford strategically announced a series of “Fusion Flash Concerts,” via e-mail advertisements, in the hopes of “appropriating the trend . . . in order to make a product seem cool” (Wasik 2006, 61). However, compared to Wasik’s original flash mobs, where information was not announced until the last minute and the whole event lasted ten minutes or less, Ford’s flash mobs appeared to be something else entirely. E-mails went out six days prior to the event, and radio stations and newspapers promoted the “secret” concerts with advertisements. The actual events, or concerts, were sparsely attended and lasted much longer than ten minutes. However, Ford’s cooptation of the flash mob idea did manage to succeed as an attempt at re-territorialization.
By associating itself (a huge corporation) with the flash mob, Ford successfully made flash mobs passé in the eyes of the general public, thereby emptying out the potential of the flash mob (at least in its original form) for creating future deterritorializations in the eyes of the nation’s youth. To put it simply, Ford appropriated the flash mob, made it uncool, and stuck it on the shelf. This goal of the corporation machine to reterritorialize, both through the display of the police and the Ford Fusion Concert, stands as a testament of the flash mob’s deterritorializing power during its earliest phases. Since that time, hybridizations and offspring of the original flash mob, such as the freeze, dance mob, and zombie mob appeared, providing additional deterritorializations. Ultimately, these new forms of flash mob were reterritorialized through the realm of pop culture, where advertisers, television producers, and even high school band directors began experimenting with the flash mob, once again capturing the phenomenon and making it family-friendly (and therefore less cool). Today, in the overtly political types of flash mobs discussed in this essay, we recognize new avenues of deterritorialization.
Flash mobs offered Wasik’s hipsters the chance to act in concert, to merge themselves into a large, communal mass of like-minded compatriots. They join masses of individualized and visible bodies together into one mob collective. In this act of conversion, individual visibility vanishes, while a sort of collective visibility emerges in its place, or, as the common saying goes, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Furthermore, due to the anonymity of the mob organizer, flash mobs operate with a pack mentality, pointing once again toward the democratizing collective visibility established. It is this pack mentality, distinguished from that of the average crowd or mob, that Deleuze and Guattari (1989) refer to as a “multiplicity” (29).
In his coming-out article, Wasik (2006) refers to this pack mentality when discussing his impetus for creating the flash mob. Frustrated by what he labels “scenesterism, the appeal of concerts and plays and readings and gallery shows deriving less from the work itself than from the social opportunities the work might engender,” Wasik desired to create an art project based purely on the notion of scene, “meaning the scene would be the entire point of the work, and indeed would itself constitute the work” (58). What appears to fascinate Wasik is the fact that people not only answered his e-mails and showed up, but that they forwarded them on to their friends and acquaintances, thereby creating the large numbers of people who gathered on site to form the mob. These individuals did not attend and participate out of a desire to show off their talents, intellect, or any other special skill. Instead, they wished to be part of the scene—hip enough to know what all the other young hipsters were doing, and doing it themselves. When they arrived at the mob site, their goal was not to stand out as special or unique, but to blend into the pack and become a part of the overall herd of bodies. That is to say, they gladly shed any identifiers of their distinct individuality in order to be part of a community of bodies acting as one.
This distinction is important for a number of reasons. First it shows us that the flash mob is not an unruly, disorganized crowd comprised of anarchical bodies, wishing to wreak havoc and create chaos. The flash mob is also not a mindless mass following the whims of a dictator or leader of some sort. Rather, it operates as a pack—a formation of like-minded individuals who either see or feel a kinship with one another and come together to act as one. Elias Canetti (1981), writing on the distinction between crowds and packs in his Crowds and Power, states that for the pack, “equality and direction really exist. The first thing that strikes one about the pack is its unswerving direction; equality is expressed in the fact that all are obsessed by the same goal” (93). Although Canetti might classify the flash mob as a crowd, based on its large size, one cannot deny that the mob meets his criteria for the pack. The flash mob forms quickly and solely for the purpose of creating a scene by swarming upon a predetermined site and then leaves after a ten-minute interval. Unlike Canetti’s crowd, the flash mob’s direction is unswerving—participants do not move outside the boundaries of the predetermined site, and they do not linger after the conclusion of the mob. Furthermore, this concerted effort to act as one body in the act of arrival, performance of an action, and departure is the sole goal of the mob. As such, the flash mob meets Canetti’s second requirement for a pack: the expression of equality through the shared obsession with a particular goal.
Working from Canetti, Deleuze and Guattari (1989) make a further distinction between those who lead packs and those who lead groups. For Deleuze and Guattari, the leader of a group or mass (a crowd) maintains an outside position from which she commands, capitalizes, and consolidates. The leader of a pack, however, remains inside, acting more as a sort of tribal chief who persuades, mobilizes, and catalyzes the other members (37). Wasik chose the latter of these two options, acting as the leader of a pack more than of a crowd or mass. To begin, Wasik took part in each of the eight New York City mobs he created, never revealing his identity as “Bob,” the author of the original e-mails. By maintaining an interior position, Wasik easily provoked and catalyzed action within the crowd, by passing out instructions (along with other predetermined participants) and prompting the mobbers to begin performing the actions listed on their instruction cards or e-mails by acting them out himself. Furthermore, due to his interior position, Wasik played “move by move,” coordinating his actions with those of his fellow participants as the mobs deviated from their preplanned directions (33). Although all Wasik’s flash mobs deviated from their printed rules, his eighth and final mob clearly shows their pack mentality.
In Mob #8, participants were told to gather in a concrete alcove on Forty-Second Street and follow the instructions coming from “the performer,” a portable boom box.6 Mobbers arrived at the scene ready to follow instructions, but their collective cheering became so loud it drowned out the instructions emanating from the boom box. Around this time, one participant opened a briefcase containing a glowing neon sign and then held up two fingers. Upon seeing this, the mob assumed this participant (and not the boom box) to be “the performer” providing instruction and collectively began chanting “Peace!” As Wasik (2006) states, “The project had been hijacked by a figure more charismatic than myself” (60). Hijacking, in my opinion, is not the right word to describe what happened in Wasik’s eighth mob. I believe the mob, acting as a pack or multiplicity, displayed its own mind/will and began to follow its own movements and desires, rather than those predetermined by Wasik. Wasik, at that moment, had to choose between stepping outside the bounds of the pack and asserting his own voice/role as a leader-commander or remaining within the bounds of the pack and following their wishes. He chose the latter.
A unique power relationship operates between the flash mob and its audience, consisting of both those people who work at the site of the mob and any other individuals at the site where the mob occurs. The mob’s presence frustrates the expectations of this audience, who then must choose among acquiescing to the presence of the mob by simply watching it unfold (or joining in), refusing to acknowledge the mob’s presence by continuing with their regular routine, or actively fighting back. I believe that in the case of the political flash mob, there are two target audiences. The first consists of the representatives of the corporation machine encountered on site—employees, managers, and other staff. The second is anyone with access to media, as often these culture jammers seek to use flash mobs as ways to advocate for particular causes, hoping that videos of their actions will go viral or be covered in news media.
Note that by replacing their individual visibility with a shared, collective visibility, flash mobbers turn the usually invisible audience—who in more conventional performance venues sits at the back of a darkened theater and watches with a degree of invisibility—into a consciously recognized and visible set of onlookers. Something about the flash mob shouts, “We know you are watching us daily and that you want to watch something, so let us give you something to watch.” In this reversal of visibility, the flash mob turns the surveillance camera in the bank lobby back onto the bank, the corporations, the industrial complexes, and the surveillers who intently watch our everyday lives. The mobbers move from acts of obedience—typical of our control society—to acts of performance, intended for an audience that prior to the mob thought themselves powerful and secure in their invisibility. The flash mob, in essence, taunts the unseen tower guard in the panoptic prison, giving him much more to watch than he bargained for—or even, one might argue, checking to see if he’s on duty at all. The performance of the mob participants, although dependent on a form of discipline,7 uses that discipline to reverse the power structures inherent in the economy of visibility. In other words, the mobbers use discipline against itself, in an effort to reverse the gaze. This cooptation of disciplinary strategies operates as a repetition with a difference, intended to create a new form of resistance. Stated differently, the flash mob not only taunts the targeted watcher, but also pulls back the curtain on the wizard to reveal his true identity to anyone else who might be (or ultimately ends up) watching.
So, what might we learn from the flash mob? Primarily, we learn how governmentality operates in our daily lives. The mob exposes the unwritten and unspoken rules that govern our daily behavior—rules that we rarely acknowledge, let alone question. Furthermore, the flash mob reminds us of the power of the mob or swarm as an acting body. In essence, the flash mob reminds us that we do, indeed, still have a choice. Finally, the flash mob teaches us that new technologies offer new strategies for exposing and even fighting power, in a myriad of different forms. The flash mob reminds us of the power we have at our disposal—in our ability to gather as a mass through the use of our new technologies—while acknowledging, often in silly, humorous ways, that this new power is neither good nor bad, merely dangerous. As such, one might view the flash mob as both an expression and a critique of the potential of contemporary democracy.
Through the combination of technological tools, performative bodies, and social machines, flash mobs form new assemblages offering new methods of living, performing, and communicating. Often, when used by culture jamming activisits such as those involved in the Target, Whole Foods, and UfSO mobs discussed in this article, the flash mob becomes a way of responding to the corporations and power structures that constantly feed us messages, but rarely allow us opportunities to reply. These flash mobs (like other types of culture jamming) make visible patterns of control and behavior overlooked and ignored by many, often while providing their performers and audiences with alternative ways of thinking about and/or fighting back against governments and corporations. Just as de Certeau (1984) suggested, by “shedding a different light on the language of a place,” or pulling one over on us all, these flashes grab our undivided attention (37–38). It is my hope that such flashes alert their audiences not only to the fact that they have been tricked into taking a ride in an avocado-green dryer, but also to the specific ways in which they might turn that trick to their own advantage and get back at their Big Brother for such a dirty, dirty deed.
1 As described by Plato in his Symposium, “poeisis” is used here to denote a type of creating, or art-making.
2 For a detailed discussion of détournement, see the introduction to this volume. For a longer discussion of how flash mobs operate as acts of détournement, see Walker (2013).
3 De Certeau (1984) defines la perruque, or the wig, as “the worker’s own work disguised as work for his employer” which “actually diverts time . . . from the factory for work that is free, creative, and precisely not directed toward profit” (25).
4 Deleuze (1990) argued that with the advent of new technologies, most notably the computer, one no longer seeks control over individual bodies, but over networks and populations. To achieve such control, individual forms of testing and labeling that were typical of the disciplinary society, such as the examination, are replaced with more continuous forms of control, such as perpetual training. In other words, one does not move from one institution to another, as in the disciplinary society. Rather, “one is never finished with anything” but always coexisting among institutions, whose controls are manifested as slight modulations or adjustments (1).
5 Drawing from Kenneth Burke, one can think of form as the container and substance as the thing that it contains.
6 The following description is taken from Wasik’s (2006) own account of the eighth and final mob he created, as described in his article of March 2006.
7 The discipline I see the flash mob operating under is that of following a set of instructions, or in certain cases, learning a particular choreography (for a dance or for an arrival and departure).
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