Culture War: Affective Cultural Politics, Tepid Nationalism and Art Activism

By Camilla Møhring Reestorff

The culture wars – intertwining art, culture and politics – have sparked prominent political debates across the globe for many years, but particularly in Europe and America since 2001. Focusing specifically on the experience of Denmark during this period, Culture War aims to analyse and understand the rise of right-wing nationalism in Europe as part of the globalisation and mediatisation of the modern nation state and the culture war and affective politics arising from it. This culture war provides an example of an affective cultural politics in which institutional structures become entwined with media representations, events and patterns of belonging.

Employing a detailed and critically reflective argument covering social media, television, political campaigns, advertising and 'artivism,' Camilla Møhring Reestorff refuses the traditional distinction between the world of visual culture and the political domain, and she provides multiple tools for understanding the dynamics of contemporary affective cultural politics in a highly mediatised environment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Apr 4, 2017
• ISBN: 9781783207596

Book preview

Chapter 1

Introduction

Being in a Culture War

Culture wars have followed me since my childhood in the Danish public school system when teachers often were accused of ‘Marxist indoctrination’ (Baunsbak-Jensen 1974; Petersen 1976). As a university student and later staff member at the University of Aarhus, education and national knowledge was once again the centre of political attention. In 2003, as a part of their proclamation of a culture war, the Danish government, led by Venstre – Denmark’s Liberal Party¹ in coalition with the Conservative People’s Party² and with the parliamentary support of The Danish People’s Party,³ demanded a break with experts and arbiters of taste (Hardis and Mortensen 2003; Holm and Jespersen 2003; Jespersen and Fuglsang 2004). In 2012, I was teaching a master’s course for a group of students enrolled in the programme for Scandinavian Studies. The course caught the attention of the Danish politician Marie Krarup, who is a member of the parliament for the Danish People’s Party. In her blog in one of the large newspapers in Denmark, she attacked the education in Scandinavian Studies for not teaching classic Danish literature and for teaching American and English literature, film and video art and critical cultural theories. Krarup was particularly concerned about my course. Noting that the course reflected university teachers’ ‘civil disobedience’, she took offence at the phrasing ‘the globalized nation-state’ and wrote:

If the nation-state is globalized it does no longer have a valuable, national culture and literature that must be delivered from generation to generation. Then you might as well spend your time reading chilling stories and watching Borat, which is also being thought. Then it must be meaningless to pursue Danish literature, even if something else is required in the consolidation act […] But dear university teachers, the Danish nation-state exists and it must continue to exist and so must our Danish culture and our fantastic Danish authors. We must not forget Holberg, Blicher and Pontoppidan because of some current counter trends. Dear teachers, you have a huge responsibility to make sure that the literary treasure is remembered, studied and kept alive. You must live up to your responsibility! Put Danish literature back on the curriculum!

(Krarup 2012)

The course I was teaching did not study Larry Charles and Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat (2006), nor did it include chilling stories. As a course in culture and media studies, it did not include Danish literary classics, but it did study how contemporary media and media aesthetic practices reflect the impact of globalization on the nation state. I was puzzled (but not surprised) by Krarup’s critique. Because why would I be considered a ‘civil disobedient university teacher’ when I was researching and teaching a course within the framework of the education and my job description. While I was certainly teaching critical theory, Krarup could not accuse me of not engaging with the education’s Scandinavian framework. Her critique thus reflects a struggle to define the relation between the nation state and globalization and a concern that ‘Danish culture’ might disappear. Yet, Krarup’s critique not only concerns a fear that ‘Danish culture’ will be forgotten, it is also a reflection of a particular understanding of ‘Danishness’. The media and media aesthetic practices studied in my course reflected the impact of globalization and mediatization on the nation state. Thus, Krarup’s critique is intriguing not only because it demands that ‘Danish culture’ and literature are kept alive, but also because it implicitly claims that aesthetic practices that reflect upon globalization and have a global attitude do not qualify as Danish cultural heritage. Krarup’s critique is thus illustrative of an attempt to determine what defines the nation state and counts as official national knowledge.

The comparison between my childhood experiences with the public school system and my experiences at the university makes it clear that the recent culture war is not quite the same as the culture war that took place during my childhood. It thus exemplifies the fact that there are multiple culture wars, which can be fought for generations and take on different characteristics. But it also exemplifies that despite their differences culture wars share similarities. They concern negotiations of who has political legitimacy within the politics of the nation state, and they often concern the governing of what counts as official national knowledge, who are allowed to convey it and from what perspective (Apple 2013). It is from this outset that I, in this book, set out to understand and conceptualize culture wars and analyse the development of the Danish culture war.

Culture War

Culture wars are reoccurring historical-cultural-political phenomena that, although they manifest at different times and in a number of particular local, regional and national cultural conflicts, also share similarities. Culture wars occur in the intersections between power and counter-power, and concern the legitimacy and citizen control of the government (Rosanvallon 2012: 12) and more importantly the legitimacy and definition of the people. In that sense, culture wars concern the underlying foundation of democracy because they negotiate agency and access to and in the nation state. The struggles and negotiations of agency and access in the nation state manifest differently across regions and nations, but they often concern struggles to secure national autonomy, a renewed preoccupation with the national past, attempts to define official national knowledge, an increased focus on nation symbols and attempts to regulate the citizen body and its relation to the nation state. These aspects of culture wars are indicative of a long and diverse history of cultural political struggles to define the relation between political agency, national autonomy, cultural identity and ‘the national symbolic’ (Berlant 1991). This indicates culture wars are international phenomenons that can be studied comparatively between regions and nation states, but culture wars also manifest locally and in the context of specific nation states. The Danish culture war, which is the analytical focus of this book, is thus illustrative in relation to the conceptualization of culture wars as an international phenomenon and the development of new forms of affective politics, but it is also worth a study on its own accord because it has been the number one topic of political conflict in Denmark for more than a decade and, on several occasions, has generated global attention.

In 2016, a government bill (Folketingstidende 2016), which stipulated 34 restrictions on the Danish immigration policy, made it possible for the police to search for and seize refugees and asylum seekers’ valuables, including jewellery, that do not have sentimental value. Through the process of the passing of the bill, it was intensely debated how much, which and when valuables should be confiscated. During the process leading to the passing of the bill, the amount that refugees were allowed to keep was changed from 3000 to 10,000 Danish Kroner. The bill, which was quickly nicknamed the ‘jewellery law’, caught international attention and was compared to policies within Nazi Germany. In Steve Bell’s cartoon Denmark’s Glory, published in The Guardian, the Danish Prime Minister for the Liberal Party Lars Løkke Rasmussen is, for instance, depicted as being offended for being compared with the Nazis, while wearing the Danish flag around his arm, modulated to bear close resemblance with both the Swastika and a pirate flag. The cartoon also targets the Danish brands LEGO (the bricks are in the background) and Carlsberg, whose slogan ‘Probably the best beer in the world’ is hijacked and turned into ‘Probably the stupidest political party in the world’, with an obvious reference to the Danish Liberal Party. The cartoon was, by the spokesman for the Danish Liberal Party, Jakob Ellemann-Jensen, called unsympathetic, condemnable and out of historical context (dr.dk 2016). Yet the government was not only criticized by cartoonists and news outlets, it also had to defend its policy in the European parliament (Jørgensen 2016; European Parliament News 2016). Interestingly, despite the controversy at the time of writing in March 2016, according to the police board there ‘has not been a case in which the new legislation has given cause to confiscate money or valuables’ (Schmidt 2016; Borg 2016). This and the fact that ‘the Immigration, Integration and Housing Ministry cannot refer to cases within the last 50 years where asylum seekers have arrived to Denmark with a suitcase full of diamonds and gems’ (Udlændinge-, Integrations- og Boligministeriet 2016) indicate that the law was not intended to secure values of a scope that could cover the expenses of mending for asylum seekers. Rather, the law must be understood as mediatized (Hjarvard 2008; Hepp 2012) politics. The jewellery law is thus a part of the Danish culture war because it concerns access to the nation state, but also because it is a type of mediatized politics in which political participants shape their message to ensure that it will enter the media system (Mazzoleni and Schultz 1999). In the case of the jewellery law, this mediatization ensures that the law, and thus the question of the conditions for entering the nation state Denmark, gets heavily circulated and debated. It also ensures that the attention becomes focused and intensified around the question of whether or not to confiscate jewellery, and as such the 33 other immigration policies are displaced from the public debate. As such, the law becomes an intensified mediatized imaginary from which to debate immigration politics and access and agency in the nation state, but potentially also a way to overlook other legislations that do not capture the attention of the mediatized public field.

Figure 1: Steve Bell: Denmark’s Glory (2016). In The Guardian, 26 January 2016. Courtesy of the artist.

The jewellery law became a defining event in the European Union’s handling of the war and humanitarian disaster in Syria and the subsequent increase of refugees, but it also caused international attention to the Danish culture war. This was not the first time that the Danish culture war caught international attention. On 9 September 2005, the so-called cartoon crisis began when the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten ran 12 cartoons of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad together with articles on freedom of speech and alleged self-censorship, in which Jyllands-Posten’s editor for culture, among other things, argued that ‘artists, authors, cartoonists, translators and actors are avoiding our time’s most important cultural meeting, the one between Islam and the secular, Western countries with their roots in Christianity’ (Rose 2005). A number of events led to a diplomatic crisis that escalated in violent protests. The cartoons and framing of Islam and Muslims led the Danish Islam Society to demand that the newspaper withdraw the cartoons and give Muslims an apology. In Copenhagen, a demonstration was held against the cartoons and the alleged negative framing of Muslims in the media. On 12 October 2005, 11 ambassadors from Muslim countries sent a letter to the Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, in which they called for attention towards what they believed to be an urgent matter:

This pertains to the on-going smearing campaign in Danish public circles and media against Islam and Muslims. Radio Holger’s remarks for which it was indicted, DF MP and Mayoral candidate Louise Freverts derogatory remarks, Culture Minister Brian Mikkelsen’s statement on war against Muslims and Daily Jyllands-Posten’s cultural page inviting people to draw sketches of Holy Prophet Mohammed (PBUH) are some recent examples.

(Danmarkshistorien.dk 2015)

The ambassadors also asked the Prime Minister to meet and to ‘take all those responsible to task under law of the land in the interest of inter-faith harmony, better integration and Denmark’s overall relations with Muslim world’ (Danmarkshistorien.dk 2015). The Prime Minister evaded the request for a meeting and while he emphasized the importance of ‘dialogue between cultures and religions needs to be based on mutual respect and understanding’, he also emphasized that ‘freedom of expression is the very foundation of the Danish democracy’ (Danmarkshistorien.dk 2015). Later, several Danish Imams travelled to Egypt and Lebanon to gather support for their critique of Jyllands-Posten, and the Arab League strongly criticized the Danish government’s handling of the situation. The crisis escalated with protests around the world, boycotts of Danish goods and violent uprisings and burnings of Danish embassies in Damascus and Teheran and the consultancy in Beirut. But these events emerged in a complex intersection with a number of different participants and interests. It has, for instance, been argued that while the Danish Imams were certainly gaining support from some Danish Muslims, others strongly refuted their arguments and efforts and that the effects of their journey are to be found in its intersection with a ‘push back against the Freedom Agenda of the United States, which targeted Egypt for special attention’ (Klausen 2009: 179).

The cartoon crisis and the jewellery law both are examples of incidents in which the Danish culture war results in global media events. These events compile and intensify media debates: they are simultaneously ‘situated in time and space’ and are global in the sense that they make ‘those who are not physically present feel as if they were’, and therefore they become ‘subject to a particular regime of (audio-visual) media representation that simulates the experience of physical attendance whilst technologically enhancing it’ (Rowe 2000: 2). It is important to keep in mind that these mediatized and global events are ‘situated in time and space’ and thus not only have global and transnational outcomes but also particular and local manifestations. The cartoon crisis developed globally, but it also resulted in local reflections, for instance, about national identity and globalization (Stage 2011). Carsten Stage has argued that the debate about the cartoon crisis, in the Danish media public, became closely intertwined with struggles to define Danish identity and that the Danish media became active participants in this struggle by attaching to and reproducing certain understandings of Danishness (Stage 2011: 20). As such, the global media events that emerged around the cartoon crisis and the jewellery law are closely intertwined with local configurations of the nation state, national culture and identity. Therefore, while these media events are certainly global in their scope and have different impacts in different regions, they must also be understood as moments of intensification in a culture war that has a longer historical backdrop.

The cartoon crisis, the jewellery law and the global media events that they prompted are not emerging out of thin air. Their complexity cannot be understood by approaching them as isolated events. Rather, they must be understood as part of the ongoing Danish culture war. This is, for instance, evident in the intersection and crisscrossing between different participants and events. The editorial decision to run the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad was, for instance, inspired by then Minister of Culture Brian Mikkelsen, who, the week before Jyllands-Posten’s cartoons, said that the culture war must be fought:

Against fundamentalists. I was especially inspired by two recent events. The author Kåre Bluitgen, who told, that he had difficulties finding illustrators to his book on Islam. And the comedian Frank Hvam who said that did not dare to seriously joke about Islam. The two messages made the alarm bells ring, because my fear is that we will be a society dominated by fear. Politicians must signal that we take this fight seriously.

(Lenler 2005)⁴

Mikkelsen was, in this quote, defending his Culture Canon (the Culture Canon is discussed in chapter three), and as such the Minister and the Ministry for Culture became closely intertwined with the cartoon crisis. The Minister’s argument that illustrators and comedians did not dare to provoke Islam was namely used in the argument for running the cartoons. Jyllands-Posten’s argument for the cartoons began:

The comedian Frank Hvam recently admitted that he ‘does not dare to take the piss on the Quran on live-TV’. An illustrator, who is to illustrate a children’s book on Mohammad wants to be anonymous.

(Rose 2015)

This confirms that the global media events such as the cartoon crisis and the jewellery law are moments of intensification of an ongoing culture war and that they often are intertwined with a number of different political participants – from politicians to comedians, authors and illustrators – who in different ways utilize art and culture in their articulating of the relation between the nation state, its citizens and the national symbolic.

When did the Danish culture war begin? As already indicated, culture wars can manifest differently over time and have different local, national, regional and global forms and outcomes, and as such it is difficult to delineate the exact starting point of the Danish culture war. However, the culture war that I am referring to, when I am referring to the Danish culture war, was initiated by the prime minister at the time, Anders Fogh Rasmussen (who later became Secretary General of NATO). This culture war began around the turn of the century and the new era in international politics that emerged in the wake of the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11 and the subsequent war on Afghanistan and Iraq. These events had an impact across the world and on Danish politics where Denmark supported the so-called war against terror announced by then American President George W. Bush and the engagement in Afghanistan. The Danish government also ignored the United Nations’ Security Council and strong voices in the European Union, such as Germany and France, and supported the invasion of Iraq, joining a multinational force administered by President George W. Bush and the prime minister of the United Kingdom at the time, Tony Blair.

At the same time as these international events, Denmark underwent what has been called a ‘change in political system’. At the parliament election in 2001, the left-wing parties and the Social Democrats lost voter support and the Danish Liberal Party and especially the Danish People’s Party had success. Anders Fogh Rasmussen from the Danish Liberal Party became minister for a government coalition with the Conservative People’s Party. The government was, as it is usually the case in Denmark, a minority government, and in order to sustain it had the parliamentary support of the Danish People’s Party, known for its anti-immigration policies. The change in political system was thus a radical change in the balance of power. But it was also a change in the understanding of Denmark as nation state and Danish culture and identity. Søren Krarup, who is a priest, author and Member of Parliament for the Danish People’s Party (2001−2011), claimed that the change in political system was the people’s protest against immigration and against an alleged failure to secure Denmark as a nation state. He wrote:

The change of political system was not as much political as popular – almost, I would say – spiritual. It was the people, dare I say the people’s spirit, who stepped up and changed a line, which was carrying a catastrophe for the people in its bosom. I have said that it was the 10.000 letters to the editor that changed Denmark’s history and sacked a government, which in an ideological solo race had stepped on the first-born people’s right to their mother country and opened for a future in which Danes could be a minority in their own country. Instinctively the Danes sensed the reality. In their cities, on their streets, in their apartment buildings they could see what was happening to Denmark and in a deeply justified protest the people said no to the ideological and political forces that was about to change a nation to an immigration state.

(Krarup 2006)

Krarup called immigration to Denmark and the immigration policies of the 1980s and 1990s a ‘rape of the Danes’ and argued that the ‘Danes’ rose against immigration to defend their nation state and their rights as ‘first-borns’ (Krarup 2006). Krarup’s emphasis on Danish culture and identity can also be found in Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s call for a culture war.

Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s call for a culture war was in correlation with the international events, including the ‘war against terror’, and the local change of political system. Fogh Rasmussen emphasized a break with arbiters of taste and a change in attitude to accommodate individual liberty. This may appear to be a traditional liberal project. However, the significance is not the liberal goal, but the means through which it is accomplished. Fogh Rasmussen emphasized the importance of culture and argued that value debates are more important than economical or legislative politics:

I actually have the opinion that to set the agenda in the value debate will change the society much more than these legislative changes. I am talking culture in the broad sense: It is the outcome of the culture war that determines Denmark’s future. Not economic politics. Not technocratic changes of legislative systems. It is crucial who succeeds in setting the agenda in the value debate. And as a government during the first year we have completely changed the agenda, compared to what was valid until the 2001 election. Completely changed it. And it will mean a lot more for Denmark’s future.

(Hardis and Mortensen 2003)

Fogh Rasmussen’s emphasis on culture and the value debate over legislative changes helps to clarify the emphasis on the anchoring of national identity, prevalent in the Danish culture war, and it is an indication of the development of affective cultural politics that I discuss throughout the book.

In order to understand Fogh Rasmussen’s emphasis on cultural changes over the legislative system as well as global media events such as the cartoon crisis and the jewellery law, it is necessary to understand the development of the culture war and critically engage with what I refer to as mediatized and affective cultural politics. This requires an analytical and theoretical framework that expands the approach to the study of the culture war and cultural politics in relation to three important aspects. First, the culture war must be understood as a political conflict that, in light of globalization, is engaged with consolidating or negotiating the relationship between the nation state, the national borders, the citizens and the national symbolic. Second, the culture war must be understood as a mediatized political conflict shaped by very different political participants. The emphasis on different participants and their engagement in the culture war entails that the theoretical and analytical approaches must transgress disciplinary and institutional boundaries. Furthermore, the emphasis on mediatized participatory diversity and the national symbolic requires an understanding of politics that acknowledges the importance of visual imaginaries and takes into account how the realm of the visual figures in the culture war. Finally, the study of the Danish culture war and its reconfiguration of the national symbolic calls for analytic and theoretical approaches that not only focus on institutional and representational politics, but also its intersection with affective cultural politics.

Globalization and Tepid Nationalism

The media events caused by the jewellery law and the cartoon crises are indicative of the global reach of culture wars. These global media events also highlight that globalization and new media technologies are the preconditions for a mediatized (Hjarvard 2008; Hepp 2011) political arena that simultaneously renders possible and challenges a diverse field of political participation. However, globalization is also of importance in the local and national reconfigurations of the national symbolic. This is abundantly clear when Søren Krarup, quoted above, emphasizes a ‘Danish national spirit’ that ‘protests against immigration’ and stands firm on ‘the first-borns’ rights’. Thus, the negotiation of agency and access in and to the nation state is tied to processes of globalization and attempts to secure or negotiate the relation between the national borders and the cultural identity of the citizens. This also indicates that the culture war negotiates impact of globalization in and between processes of de- and reterritorialization (Tomlinson 1999; Papastergiadis 2000). Globalization deterritorializes the relation between the nation state, cultural identity and geography (Deleuze and Guattari 2004; Tomlinson 1999; Appadurai 1997, 2006; Papastergiadis 2000), but it is important not to reduce the impact of the empirical processes of globalization on deterritorialization. Globalization is also embedded in processes of cultural meaning-making, and thus becomes the subject of negotiations in which the relationship between the nation state, cultural identity and geography might be reconfigured or reterritorialized. As such, the relationship between the nation state, its citizen and cultural identity is never stable. In this regard the culture war is a struggle to come to terms with globalization that is itself informed by globalization. The culture war and its focus on global transformations of the nation state entail questions of cultural meaning-production are foregrounded, as the national symbolic becomes the centre of political attention.

The global transformations and processes of cultural meaning-making have resulted in intense negotiations of the nation state and ‘the national symbolic’ (Berlant 1991), spanning from emphasis on the ‘national spirit’ to attempts to secure national coherence through an increased focus on national symbols such as the national flag. Throughout this book I suggest that these negotiations of the nation state and the national symbolic highlight a specific kind of nationalism, i.e. tepid nationalism. As a term, tepid nationalism appears disquieting because nationalism is often associated with a political ideology that emphasizes ethnicity and national purity. Tepid nationalism may be utilized as a part of this kind of ideology, but as a term tepid nationalism is intended to specify the relation between nationalism and the nation state. Michael Billig describes nationalism as either hot or banal. Whereas hot nationalism is ‘the force which creates nation states or which threatens the stability of existing states’ (Billig 1995: 43), banal nationalism is the ‘ideological habits, by which our nations are reproduced as nations, are unnamed and, thereby, unnoticed’ (6). However, in order to understand the dynamics of the Danish culture war negotiations of the nation state and the national symbolic, neither hot nor banal nationalism is sufficient. These negotiations do not, as hot nationalism, create new nation states or threaten the stability of an existing state, and nor do they only manifest as banal nationalism’s unnoticed ideological habits. Aspects of both banal and hot nationalism are present in the Danish culture war, but the most visible kind of nationalism is preoccupied with the relation between ‘the people’ and the nation state and is most often articulated and highly noticeable. This kind of tepid nationalism is evident in the governmental canon projects and citizenship tests that I investigate later in this book, but it is also evident when Marie Krarup, as discussed, emphasizes that Danish national culture and literary classics by ‘Holberg, Blicher and Pontoppidan’ must ‘be passed on from generation to generation’ (Krarup 2012).

Interestingly, tepid nationalism is also present in cultural meaning-making that is positive towards the prospects of globalization and actually attempts to challenge nationalists’ sentiments. For instance, in 2012 members of the Conservative People’s Party, Lars Barfoed, Benedikte Kjær and Rasmus Jarlov, accused the government for promoting and strengthening all kinds of culture and thus devaluating Danish culture. As a response, members of the coalition government, Sofie Carsten Nielsen from the Social Liberal Party, Magnus Heunicke from the Social Democrats and Jesper Petersen from the Socialist People’s Party, mocked the emphasis on ‘God, Kingdom and Mother Country’. But at the same time they pointed out a shared history and specific objects that they believe define Denmark. As such, their critique of a specific kind of nationalism paradoxically manifests as tepid nationalism. They write:

In the government parties we do not believe that it is only god, king and mother country that bind the nation. But that does not mean that we are without history. On the contrary we believe that Denmark’s coherence and Danish culture have deep historical roots and is founded in democratic movements such as the co-operative movement, the workers movement, the women’s movement and the Nordic welfare model, which in solidarity ensures that the broadest shoulders carry the heaviest burden.

(Heunicke, Nielsen and Petersen 2012)

The term ‘tepid nationalism’ is designation to capture the kind of nationalist sentiment that is articulated in order to preserve an existing nation state. Tepid nationalism magnifies the number of national symbols and provides the symbols with a specific content and ideological framing as part of the national symbolic imaginary. This is for instance seen when Krarup lists specific authors and when Heunicke, Nielsen and Petersen emphasize the cooperative movement. Further to this, tepid nationalism can be conceptualized as an affective identity politics that expands the national symbolic by affectively vitalizing and providing concrete manifestations of the unrepresentable complex reality of the relationship between the nation state and the citizens. Through this materialization of the national symbolic, tepid nationalism regulates the national symbolic by strengthening the social and affective relations between individuals and the nation state. Tepid nationalism must be studied as an ingrained part of the culture war because it inherently concerns the relationship between the nation state, the citizens and the national symbolic, and thus also is a matter of agency and access in the nation state.

Participatory Struggles and Artivism

The comedians and musicians Adam & Noah became an online sensation in 2015 due to their short handheld selfie-style videos, uploaded on Facebook, in which they grabble with the concept of Danes and Danishness. Each video begins ‘what’s up Dane?’ and ends ‘yalla Fuck af vi ses’ playfully merging Arabic, English and Danish into a shared or globalized language. Also in 2015, their TV show, What’s Up Danes!?, which aired on the Danish public service channel DR2, investigated, documented and playfully negotiated Danish traditions, food, parties, pets, family life and so on. When the jewellery law was first proposed in December 2015, Adam & Noah quickly responded. In a video titled ‘OUR LAST VIDEO!!!’ (Adam & Noah 2015a), Adam & Noah are running through a forest trying to flee to Sweden because Minister of Immigration, Integration and Housing Inger Støjberg wants to steal their gold. Furthermore, they combine their usual ‘Yalla fuck af vi ses’ with the Nazi ‘sieg heil’ when they are saying goodbye to Støjberg. As such they were at the cutting edge of the debate raised by Steve Bell and his cartoon, Denmark’s Glory, shown in Figure 1. Adam & Noah thus engage in the culture war not only by playfully reorienting narratives of truth and concrete objects of tepid nationalism, but also by explicitly confronting Minister of Immigration, Integration and Housing Inger Støjberg and the jewellery law.

Figure 2: In their book Klogskab til danskere (Wisdom for Danes), Adam & Noah (2015b) ask ‘whats up Dane?’ They playfully reappropriate notions of ‘Danishness’ and Danish identity when they for instance declare that Danes do not know how to survive a Danish Winter: ‘As soon as it starts to rain a bit all Danes freak out and complain about the weather. It is weird! You are Danes. Ah hell, Vikings! Get a grip’. Courtesy of the artists.

By claiming to flee the country, Adam & Noah indicate that they are not welcome in Denmark and as such they raise attention to matters of agency and access to and in the nation state. In order to understand the way in which Adam & Noah participate in the culture war, it is necessary to engage in a field of mediatized politics in which both politicians and non-governmental participants adapt and alter their practices and content in order to obtain media circulation. Both the jewellery law and Adam & Noah’s meddling with the law are thus examples of mediatized politics. But this also calls for attention to the multiple participants that potentially access the mediatized political arena. In order to understand the importance of participants such as Adam & Noah, it is necessary to study the culture war as mediatized participatory politics in which different participants compete over certain resources – including media exposure – in order to have access to and agency in the struggle to define the nation state and the national symbolic.

This mediatized and participatory arena requires a theoretical framework that goes beyond the study of institutional politics in order to capture the intersections, confrontations and exchanges between governmental and non-governmental participants. Political participants, such as Adam & Noah, and politicians from the institutional system criss-cross between different institutional and non-institutional settings and their mediatized practices require an understanding of the kind of politics that operates outside traditional political institutions. By maintaining that both governmental and non-governmental participants actively change their practices in order to obtain circulation within a mediatized political arena, I reject traditional distinctions between the world of visual culture and the domain of the political. In order to understand the complexity of the culture war it is necessary to study how different kinds of participants with different kinds of institutional anchoring are dependent on mediatized structures and networked publics. This intersection between a diverse set of participants is a result of the global ‘networked information economy’, which as noted by Yochai Benkler has resulted in a rise of effective large-scale cooperative efforts. While participants, such as Adam & Noah, are not necessarily indicative of large-scale cooperative efforts, their presence and practice require a new understanding of political participation because ‘without a broadly accepted analytical model to explain these phenomena, we tend to treat them as curiosities’ (Benkler 2006: 5). That is, if different kinds of political participants are confined by disciplinary or institutional boundaries, one fails to understand not only the functionality of political participation, but also the complexity of the participatory field that makes up the Danish culture war.

My focus on the diverse field of political participants is designed to provide a base from which to appraise the multimodal nature and complex character of the culture war and to understand its wider implications compared to narrowly conceived ideas of institutional and organizational politics. The number of participants in the culture war is inexhaustible and I, therefore, for the most part, limit the field of research to two types of participants: participants from the institutional political system and non-governmental artists and art activists – artivists. In chapter nine it will, however, be studied how these participants’ politics ‘trickle-down’ (Braun and Koopmans 2014) and impact popular opinion and mobilization online. Adam & Noah as well as Steve Bell’s cartoon Denmark’s Glory provides an entry point to the reason why I have chosen to focus on the governmental participants and non-governmental artivists. The clashes between governmental participants and non-governmental artivists are of importance because they make it abundantly clear that the culture war is also a war about visual imaginaries, i.e. about visualizing the nation state and the national symbolic.

Art and culture have always played a crucial role in the visual imaginary of the national symbolic and are utilized not only by non-governmental artists and artivists, but also by politicians from the institutional political system. Historically, art and culture have contributed both to constitute and to dissolve the nation state, notions of national identity and state power. Consider for instance the role of art and culture in imagining the emerging nation states in the 1840s. In the current Danish culture war, governmental participants tend to apply art and culture to visualize and expand the national symbolic repertoire, for instance by emphasizing the importance of certain artworks for national culture and identity. Contrary to this, artivists tend to use art and culture to challenge tepid nationalism and to designate global communities. This distinction is of course not always clear-cut, and you could for instance argue that artivists, such as Adam & Noah, also invent their own tepid nationalist imaginary when they – again playfully disruptive – articulate alleged Danish values and habits. ‘A bro’, for instance, becomes ‘too Danish’ by ‘eating a kilo of potatoes a month’ (Adam & Noah 2015b). However, as discussed, when Adam & Noah flee Inger Støjberg, there is often a distinction between artivists’ and politician’s cultural meaning-construction of the impact of globalization. Artivists who engage in the culture war often visualize a hyperglobalism that counters tepid nationalism. Hyperglobalism is often associated with faith in globalization as a ‘profound, even revolutionary set of economic, cultural, technological and political shifts’ and a ‘borderless world’ (Heywood 2014: 10). This belief can of course be found in artivism, but the kind of hyperglobalism that artivists engage in is often also focused on the ways in which nation states respond to and act in a global world.

The term ‘artivism’ must be clarified. While some artists would certainly self-identify as activists, others, including Adam & Noah, would not characterize their work as politics. Nevertheless, artistic practices can be artivists without self-identifying as such. This is because artivists use art practices to participate in political dialogue and engage in mobile publics that navigate and criss-cross between three publics: institutional, non-institutional and mediatized art publics (I elaborate on the term ‘artivism’ and the different kinds of publics in chapter six). Adam & Noah would for instance engage in the mediatized art public, but they wouldn’t necessarily identify with either institutional art or politics. As such Adam & Noah are artivists because they actively participate in and involve themselves in events, while they also maintain the significance of doing art and being fun. Artivists believe that they can do something that they would not have been able to do if they did not maintain a reference to art. In the case of Adam & Noah artivism is playful; their videos are fun. The pleasure of humorous or artivist engagements is often conceptualized in opposition to the potential displeasure of the straightforward didactic (Day 2011), and it is argued that humour and play somehow dismantles the political critique. However, the use of humour can also be an efficient artivist tool exactly because it makes politics lucid. Adam & Noah’s use of artivist play turns their actions into double-edged meanings: ‘they are actions both in play activity and with political meaning’ (Sicart 2014). They are appropriating tepid nationalism and embedding it with contradicting political sensibilities and as such their humorous and playful artivism becomes critical and disruptive. Their playful artivism aestheticizes tepid nationalism and discovers the dysfunctional, absurd, unworkable character of tepid nationalism – everything that makes it non-usable, inefficient, obsolete (Groys 2014: 6).

The focus on artivism and artivists who confront the culture war and tepid nationalism does not mean that all artists and artivists necessarily oppose the culture war and tepid nationalism. Cartoonists and artists such as Kurt Westergaard and Swedish Lars Vilks, who drew the Prophet Muhammad respectively with a bomb in his turban and a dog, certainly participate in the culture war, and as shown by Geoff Martin and Erin Steuter, in an American context, pop culture often ‘enlists’ in wars (Martin and Steuter 2010). However, I am interested in the incidences in which artivists and politicians from the political system propose different visualizations and imaginaries of globalization and of access to and agency in the nation state. This interest is due to the fact that in these confrontations it is revealed how different participants negotiate and visualize the nation state and the national symbolic. The focus on the intertwining of governmental participants and non-governmental artivists in the culture war is thus designed to further an investigation of the ways in which art and culture is applied in attempts to visualize and both configure and challenge the nation state and the national symbolic.

The emphasis on mediatized and participatory politics and on the intersection between governmental participants and non-governmental artivists provides a new approach to the study of political conflicts and culture wars. As already indicated, non-governmental artivists and governmental participants compete to define and visualize the nation state and the national symbolic. Pierre Bourdieu has argued that ‘the fields of cultural production occupy a dominated position in the field of power: that is a major fact ignored by ordinary theories of art and literature’ (1990: 144). Yet, it could also be argued that it is not only theories of art and literature that have neglected the power affiliated with cultural production, but also media, sociological and political theories that have failed to recognize the role played by, for instance, artivism within the realm of media politics. This is to some degree caused by a bias in research on political conflicts, because this kind of research, as argued by Clifford Bob, often focuses on instances where a new policy has been made. This entails that both civil society and research tend to have analytical blinders against failed efforts of policymaking and retrograde movements (Bob 2012: 5). Thus, political participation and practices that do not deliver institutional political changes tend to be neglected and in the case of artivism, simply confined to a depoliticized field of cultural production.

In this book I seek to avoid analytical blinders by focusing on a number of practices and participants that criss-cross the realms of institutional politics, media circulation and cultural production. Notably, it is not only artivists that engage in this criss-crossing, but also participants from within the institutional political system. The focus on the intertwining of institutional, governmental and non-governmental aspects of the culture war thus involves ‘a reorientation of political analysis away from the dichotomy often drawn between myopic reformism, on the one hand, and antisystemic radicalism, on the other’ (McLagan and McKee 2012: 11). Politicians from within the institutional political system and artivists are traditionally perceived as clearly demarcated by different representational regimes. However, if we are to understand the complex social appropriation of power in the culture war ‘we must look at both electoral representative democracy and the counter-democracy of indirect power’ (Rosanvallon 2008: 17). By challenging the representational regimes it is thus possible, I argue, to document and examine the culture war not only as a matter of homogeneous institutional politics, but also as a diverse field of political activity and conflict in which the character of the nation state and the national symbolic is contested. This emphasis on the visualization of the nation state and the national symbolic is obviously crucial, but the power