Citation

Odoardi P. Cognit. Semiotic. (Bern) 2010; 10(6): 33-60.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2010, Peter Lang)

DOI

10.3726/81610_33

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

In the past two decades we have observed the rise of a far-reaching transnational movement, deeply critical of globalization and capitalism. In this context, "culture jamming" is a practice that aims to challenge the multinational companies by attacking their symbolic power. The key point of jammers' activity is their original way of fighting: they manipulate corporations' semiotic artifacts, such as logos, pay-offs, advertising campaigns, and merchandising. We refer to this activity also with the term subvertising or adbusting. The article describes selected examples of this phenomenon, arguing that it can be more effectively understood if we consider the rhetoric trope of irony: this is the basic and prevalent feature in all different counterfeits produced by the practice of culture jamming. The paper reviews the features of irony as described in the literature: antiphrastic nature, cognitive role, mention, role of the context, narrative structure, metalinguistic nature and political role. Moreover, the analysis of two recent examples of counterfeiting provides heuristic force to a dialogue between ancient rhetoric and modern cognitive science. A cognitive semiotic approach can interpret the rhetoric tradition of irony, while attempting to give a strong insight into the phenomenon of culture jamming. The analysis reveals how the blending model can be an adequate tool to model the inferential processes that occur while making sense of the irony deployed by "jammers" in semiotic artifacts.