On the first occasion, the dignified ritual of power celebrating itself was disrupted by clowns. On the second occasion, security forces kept the clowns at bay for their own protection. But on the third occasion, the clowns were simply included in the ceremony. The anti-globalization protests of the 90s gave way, only a few years later, to “designated free speech zones”, where the anticipated manifestations of the movement could be corralled so that they could be photographed as the very image of liberal democracy at work. There is no image of spontaneous and collective activity that cannot be rendered into an advertisement for the world of images. The occupation of Tiananmen square or the collapse of the Berlin wall in the late 80s are now nothing more than images of people who wanted to join us in the world of images.
Martin Luther King is selling cellphones. He may be dead, but he still has a dream, and apparently it involves calling plans. The Beatles still want to be counted in (and cop out) of the ‘revolution’, but this revolution takes the form of a particular brand of sneakers. It will be the first revolution in world history with coordinated accessories. We know that wherever reaction has triumphed in the past century, it has done so by borrowing the accoutrements of some revolutionary ideology or other. It is in the advertising industry, more than in a decaying ruins of the artworld, that one can find the best examples of this detour undertaken by old cultural vehicles freighted with significance.
On leaving the 20th century, we find the copying of action by the image replaced, in its turn, by the action of copying the image. Point your device at any one of a number of popular websites – there is no need to promote their brands by naming them – and you can find a whole host of images and sounds recycled out of past images and sounds. One part of the spectacle insists on its absolute ownership of every scrap of this devalued culture, as if the vigorous protection of its “intellectual property” would in itself shore up its paltry value. Yet the other part encourages the copy, the collage, the cut-up, the mash-up. It recognizes the worthlessness of the image, indeed encourages its détournement, all the while insisting on the ownership of the site where the worthlessness of the image is itself to be celebrated.
Détournement – a diversion, a detour, a seduction, a plagiarism, an appropriation, even perhaps a hijacking – is the integration of present or past artistic productions into a construction that surpasses it. Can it be anything more? Can it be a method of critique, in and against the spectacle which reveals the wearing out and loss of importance of the raw material of spectacle itself. Détournement is already a widespread practice, but in a world which is never anything more than a plagiarism of itself, the would-be plagiarist treads carefully. That culture can be copied, that it is nothing but a copy, is merely a statement of fact. The trick is to turn the possibility of copying into an act which restores agency to the act of appropriation, rather than merely adding to the stock of worthless copies that surround us. The key to détournement is not to appropriate the image, but to appropriate the power of appropriation itself.
Détournement is an advance on the practice of collage. The collage, made famous by Cubism, is only one particular instance of détournement. It emphasizes the destructive moment. It is displacement which remains true to the infidelity of the element. The collage of the merely devalued element which develops from Cubism becomes the whole doctrine of Pop art, and its curious, inverted elitism of the displaced element (making an artwork out of a Brillo box, and so on.) From Cubism to Pop and beyond, this acceptance of devaluation is extended to a method of combining neutral and indefinitely interchangeable elements. It becomes the very practice of the ‘popular’ culture, in and against which it once worked. In contrast to Pop Art, which breaks comics up into fragments, this method aims at restoring to comics their content and importance.
Over the course of the twentieth century, the art world discovered, one by one, the elementary procedures of the reproducible image. From collage to cut-up, from readymade to mash-up, it discovered the means by which to destroy significance, but without realizing that art’s significance was itself thereby destroyed. What all of these subsidiary practices of détournement have in common is the gesture of quotation. Détournement as a critical practice is the opposite of quotation, of an authority invariably tainted if only because it has become quotable, because it is now a fragment torn away from its conditions of production, from its own movement, and ultimately from the overall frame of reference of its period and from the precise option that it constituted within that framework.
Détournement need not be piracy. It is a method of playful cultural education, the first step towards a cultural commons. The practice of détournement is independent of any legal concerns, which merely formalize after the fact the interests of proprietors and the current state of the means of spectacular production. Détournement has nothing to do with law. It is necessary to finish with any notion of personal property in this area. The consequence of détournement is the revival of bad books, films, and songs, and unintended participation of their (alleged) creators in collective production. The idea of pure, absolute expression is dead. The cheapness of détournement’s products is the password with which it bypasses every velvet rope of understanding.
The basic principles of détournement can be found in its first conscious practitioner, Isidore Ducasse, the Comte de Lautréamont. The distortions in the detourned elements must be simple, as they are directly related to the conscious or unconscious recollection of the original context, but détournement is less effective the more it approaches rational reply The mere reversal of meaning is the least effective means. For example the maxim “One can be just, if one is human” (Vauvanagues) becomes “One can be just, if one is not human.” (Ducasse). Bringing the detourned elements together can cause the loss of significance of each detourned element. Out of this devaluation, a revaluation via the organization of another meaningful ensemble which incorporates it. It is often the most distant detourned element which contributes most sharply to the effect of the whole.
The avant garde group the Situationist International (1957-1972) had several excellent proposals for detourned works. Some were realized, some were not. Take, for example, founding member Michèle Bernstein’s antipainting Victory of the Bonnot Gang. It was allegedly to form part of a series including Victory of the Paris Commune, Victory of the Spanish Republicans, Victory of the Workers Councils of Budapest and so on. Such paintings would be a negation of Pop Art which the Situationists saw as materially and ideologically characterized a hypertrophied collage practice of devaluation to no end. Bernstein’s ‘Victories’ would incorporate only toy objects and revalue them in as heavy-handed a way as possible. While borrowing from the genre of the battle painting, they also rectify the unfinished history of revolts. It seems that each new attempt to transform the world is forced to start out with the appearance of a new unrealism. The Victories are a notional work that can be favorably compared to the extant works of the Chapman Brothers, where toy soldiers are used as props for the rather more conventional notion that war is hell.
Some Situationist proposals for détournement were picked up by others. Some lapsed due to the changing fashions within the spectacle. For example, the photo-romance is no longer as popular a form as it once was, but in its place, Linda Wallace detoured the daytime soap opera Living Tomorrow (2005). On the other hand, porn has become even more popular. Len Bracken’s The East is Red is a rare example of detourned porn. Stewart Home incorporates 19th century porn texts into his novels. The Situationist proposal for detourning David Wark Griffith’s Birth of a Nation was realized by Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky, as Rebirth of a Nation.
The Situationists discovered a number of different détournement practices, but the exploration was hardly complete at the time of the demise of the Situationist International. With the defeat of the expressly political incarnation of the movement, perhaps it would be timely to retract the prohibition on the use of artistic means of negation and to explore, among other things, the full implications of détournement. Let’s start with three variants detected and classified by the Situationists themselves: deceptive, minor and parodic-serious détournement.
Deceptive Detournement: This means the détournement of an intrinsically significant element. The classic expressions of this practice are surely still Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle in writing and in film, his In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni. Where the popularization of détournement has inevitably focused on devaluing and revaluing elements of popular works, Debord still stands almost alone in his repurposing of acknowledged literary works. It is as if nobody else has yet dared to lay claim to them. The examples within these works are legion: Pascal, Lautréamont, Marx, Lukacs, Hegel. While for some readers, Society of the Spectacle appears as just so much warmed over Hegel and Lukacs, this reading misses the key process of détournement that is in operation. Debord does not quote Lukacs, but appropriate and revalue his texts.
Minor Détournement: The Situationists thought the novel dead, but foresaw a period in which it might still be worth attempting the skillful perversion of this standard literary form. Michèle Bernstein wrote two detourned novels in the early 60s, Tous Les Chevaux Du Roi and La Nuit. The former detourned the form of the postwar French equivalent of ‘chick lit’, the latter the form of the ‘new novel’. The books tell basically the same story but in the low and high literary forms of the time, respectively. Stewart Home has made a career of minor détournement. While drawn more to the work of Alexander Trocchi than to the Situationists, Home is still an excellent example of what they called minor détournement. This practice uses an element that has no importance in itself but draws its significance from the new context. In Sixty-Nine Things to Do With A Dead Princess, the insignificant element is travel literature.
Parodic-Serious Détournement: Even at its most elaborate, Debord’s cinema subordinated the image to the text. Craig Baldwin’s Tribulation 99 does away with a controlling ‘theoretical’ text. His version of détournement could be described as a development of the parodic-serious form where the accumulation of detourned elements, far from aiming to arouse indignation of laughter by alluding to some original work, express indifference towards a meaningless and forgotten original, and concern itself with rendering a certain sublimity. Baldwin appropriates the stammerings of film language — in particular its most consummate and modern examples, those which have escaped artistic ideology even more than American B movies: newsreels, previews and, above all, filmed ads. This is a classic Situationist technique, and raised to a whole new level. There may, however, be aspects of détournement which the Situationists did not inventory or much develop.
Auto Détournement: One form of détournement could be described as the applied cut-up. In ‘Rocked By Rape’, the Evolution Control Society take the words of the well known television news reader Dan Rather, cut them up, rearrange them, and set them to some bombastic hard rock power chords. The work brackets off the actual content of the news to foreground the rhetorical form of its script and the bombastic delivery of its reader. The meeting of word and music hinges on a doubling of the senses of the word ‘rocked’. In the parlance of news, we are ‘rocked’ by rape in the sense of shock, outrage, with a barely suppressed undercurrent of titillation. This sounds not too distant from being ‘rocked’ by riffs, drums, the stock forms of pop music bombast. We have to constantly defend ourselves from the poetry of the bards of conditioning — to jam their messages, to turn their rhythms inside out.
Didactic Détournement: Manifestoon, produced by Jesse Drew, voiced by A. Coe, an Old Mole Production (1996), sets extracts from the Communist Manifesto to cartoons. This short work takes up the problem of that with which whole generations are no longer familiar (Marx) and its relationship to what replaces it – ‘family’ entertainment. Manifestoon renders Marx familiar and Disney unfamiliar. It reveals class and capital at work in Disney or in Looney Tunes and the popular at work in Marx and Engels’ text. Here the piece approaches reciprocal détournement.
Reciprocal Détournement: An Inconvenient Pooh (2007) is an anonymous mash-up which combines the animated characters from Winnie the Pooh with the voice of Al Gore, “formerly the next President of the United States”, talking about global warming in his movie An Inconvenient Truth. Due to the skill with which the voice has been lip-synched to the characters, the work has an uncanny verisimilitude. Here two elements reciprocally détourn one-another. On the one hand, the Hundred Acre Wood in which Pooh and his cuddly friends live appears as a false totality. Gore’s warnings about warmings, floods and storms bring out the fragility of a world which lives without a sense of an outside. On the other hand, Gore’s lugubrious sincerity reveals here its cartoon dimension, as the warm-up act for fresh new rounds of corporate reinvention.
Ambiguous Détournement: Robert Cauble’s Alice in Wonderland, Or Who is Guy Debord? (2003) tries to introduce critical elements into the spectacle through the détournement of a consumer media product. Using DVD decryption freeware and DVD authoring programs, the detourned video appears as a special feature within the existing and publicly accessible Disney Alice in Wonderland DVDs, and then redistributed into various video rental systems for consumer access. The original material and menu structures are kept. The addition of Alice in Wonderland or Who is Guy Debord? has a parasitic relationship to the DVD product. This parasitic approach to product replacement, anticipates a moment in an adult consumer’s viewing experience when Alice in Wonderland or Who is Guy Debord? renders the meaning of the whole product ambiguous. Within the confusion as to the legitimacy of the détourned video, Cauble hopes to create a critical distance that is necessarily applied to the whole DVD.
Inverse Détournement: On Rules and Monsters: An Introduction to Free Cooperation, by Christoph Spehr and Jörg Windszus (narrated by Tony Conrad and Stephanie Rothenberg) is a work that brings to the surface the subversive bubbles that are spontaneously, but only fleetingly and half-consciously, formed and then dissolved in the imaginations of those who look at cinema images. What is it that the forces of order in science fiction movies so vigorously oppose? For Spehr and friends it is the specter of free cooperation: spontaneous, voluntary, egalitarian human agency appears in these worlds upside down as something monstrous and threatening. But this is more than a simple inversion. It’s authors also show how science fiction cinema also contains residual images of free cooperation itself.
Algorithmic Détournement: In Society of the Spectacle: The Remix, DJ Rabbi put together a blisteringly fast mash up on images found using key words from Society of the Spectacle, and combine it with a new text on the spectacular organization of society written by Mark Amerika. While the text and music have their charms, the images are of particular interest. Their selection, if not their arrangement has been decided by the algorithms employed by a common search engine, into which DJ Rabbi put key terms such as ‘spectacle’ and perhaps even ‘détournement’. The piece heightens the stakes in the tension between the objective parade of spectacular images, each perfectly substitutable for the next, and the subjective process of appropriating such images, their recruitment into a critique of their own form.
Counterfeit Détournment: The Situationists advocated the production of counterfeit issues of one or another periodical for the purposes of encouraging confusion. The Yes Men produce counterfeit websites instead. One purported to be for the Dow Chemical Company, in which the company (finally) accepted responsibility for the Bhopal catastrophe. Another was for then-Presidental Candidate George Bush, and the most famous was for the World Trade Organization. Such counterfeit actions hark back to the (proto) Situationist détournement of Notre Dame cathedral by a fake priest who announced the death of God from the pulpit during an Easter service. But just as Marx moved on from the critique of religion to that of capital, so too must détournement move on to the critique of the spectacle of capital as religion.
Functional Détournement: The spectacular organization of society is not the same thing as the world of entertainment media. Useful work ha also been done on functional images. Haroun Farocki’s Eye Machine I & II uses industrial image sources, for example from cameras that monitor a steel rolling mill. In How to Shoot a Crime, Chris Kraus mixes police documentary video of crime scenes with an interview with a professional dominatrix and shots of New York’s Lower east Side, where the interview – and perhaps some of the crimes – took place. Functional détournement marks the passage of the spectacle into the intimate dimensions of everyday life and labor, the final fusion of the production of things with the production of their appearances.
Techno Détournement: From Survival Research Laboratories to the Bureau of Inverse Technology and the Institute for Applied Autonomy, a range of groups have extended détournement from the world of images to the world of things. This could also be conceived of as a meta-détournement, moving ‘upstream’, as it were. At a time when capital has ceded the image to popular practices of copying and remixing, the question to ask concerns those aspects of production which it is not prepared to cede to the commons. Thus, while the law turns a blind eye to the odd appropriated image, and the marketing departments tacitly encourage consumers to become unpaid advertisers by circulating fragments of spectacle, the sharing of certain key technical capacities is another matter. In a replay of the hypocrisy that tolerates the possession of certain drugs but not their sale, the consumer may possess illicit images, but not write and distribute code that breaks the copy production that preserves the artifice of the image as property.
Bio Détournment: The discovery and commercialization of genetic codes opens up a spectacular new terrain for the commodity form. The work of Critical Art Ensemble attempts a détournement of lab techniques with a view to creating human agency within the biological realm. Needless to say this attempt to détourn leading technologies brought down the full force of the law. At the time of writing, members of Critical Art Ensemble now face serious federal charges. That détournement has in many areas lost its critical force is easily tracked through the growing legal indifference to it, but where certain key technologies are concerned the ‘line in the sand’ is clearly drawn. The destruction of the value of the image – first goal of détournement – has been achieved. But its second goal – ‘literary communism’, the commons in which everyone regains collective possession of the power of the image – has not. Capital draws the line at the détournement of its own means of production.
Ultra Detournement: The Situationists described this as the tendencies for détournement to operate in everyday social life. It would include both the creation of new forms and the détournement of previous forms of architecture, urbanism, art and media. Multimedia, intermedia or installation art, popular though they may be, can not be realized in isolation. The unfinished project of détournement would be combination of any or all of the detourned elements mentioned so far into larger ensembles. The basic practice of the theory of unitary urbanism will be the transcription of the whole theoretical lie of urbanism, detourned for the purpose of de-alienation. Ultra détournement might thus have two aspects: the construction of completely new landscapes out of the appropriated material of the old, and the redeployment of existing landscapes, in unaltered form, to new purposes. The project of détournement was no less than the new employment of the present city and construction of the future city.
Recuperative Détournement: Needless to say, from the Situationists’ point of view, all of these works are mere recuperations, and would attract the kind of insults they hurled at their nemesis, the pseudo-avant garde film maker Jean-Luc Godard. But recuperation no longer works merely on the scale of the celebrity purveyor of pseudo-art within the spectacle. The ‘Godard-function’ has moved up a level – or two. It is no longer a question of recuperating the negative aspect of détournement into the spectacle. Rather, the spectacle itself is nothing but the recuperation of détournement. The spectacle negates the negation of détournement, providing whole theme parks for détourned videos. The search engine – central authority of the refurbished spectacle – is nothing but the détournement of détournement. It is an infinite avant garde poem, combining together found fragments around arbitrary concordances.
Détournement attacks a kind of fetishism, where the products of collective human labor in the cultural realm become mere property. But what is distinctive about this fetishism is that it does not rest directly on the status of the thing as a commodity. It is, rather, a fetishism of memory. Not so much commodity fetishism as co-memory fetishism. And what is distinctive about détournement is that it can restore to the fragment the status of being a recognizable part of the process of the collective production of meaning in the present, through the combination of the detourned fragment into a new meaningful ensemble. Détournement frees the process of creation from the private property of the image.
Key to any practice of détournement is the practice of identifying the elements upon which it might work. There is no necessary size or shape to an element to be detourned. It could be a single image, a film sequence of any length, a word, a phrase, a whole paragraph. What matters is the identification of the superior fidelity of the element to the ensemble within which it finds itself. Détournement is in all cases a reciprocal devaluing and revaluing of the element within the development of a unifying meaning.
The Situationists détourned the practice itself from some seemingly unlikely sources. Søren Kierkegaard: “I have read your discussion to the end, and really not without some interest… you always mix in some little phrase that is not your own, and that disturbs because of the recollection it prompts.” For Kierkegaard the recollection in question is the recollection of the good. For Plato’s Socrates, the good life is not something learned from someone else. The other’s words rather prompt the memory of our own encounter with the divine. For the Situationists, the recollection a detourned phrase might disturb does not issue from some divine, otherworldly source, but is itself the product of a collective and historical labor. The detourned phrase recalls our own self-making and self-imagining abilities. We make ourselves in our own image.
Like Kierkegaard, the Situationists insist on a radical equality of all who come to the question of knowledge. For Kierkegaard the memory, or the image, of the crucifixion retains the same power, whether it happened many generations ago or happened in our generation. For the Situationists, the image in general retains the same power, whether it was made today or yesterday, and regardless of who it was made by, to present the question of our collective making of ourselves. The defining characteristic of this use of détournement is the necessity for distance to be maintained toward whatever has been turned into an official verity. Ideas improve. The meaning of words has a part in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress demands it. Staying close to an author’s phrasing, plagiarism exploits his or her expressions, erases false ideas, replaces them with correct ideas. This is the power détournement affirms.
Détournement is the fluid language of anti-ideology, but ideology has absolutely nothing to do with any particular arrangement of signs or images. In the light of détournement, even the ‘scientific’ knowledge privileged by Louis Althusser and his followers could be ideological to the extend that it is not available for collective re-appropriation. Hence the radical challenge posed by Critical Art Ensemble, who question whether the life sciences could be detourned, and made part of a collective social practice. While respectful of the rigour of scientific procedure, they question science as private property. If for Althusser the possibility of a non-ideological discourse hinges on the drive to expel the point of view of the subject; for the Situationists the reverse is the case. Détournement is a non-ideological practice to the extent that it restores collective social ‘authority’ to meaning-making.
Détournement is also at odds with Foucault’s approach to the statement. For Foucault, the statement is authorized by a particular regime of truth, a procedure for assigning truth-value to statements. The device of détournement restores all their subversive qualities to past critical judgments that have congealed into respectable truths — or, in other words, that have been transformed into lies. It occurs within a type of communication aware of its inability to enshrine any inherent and definitive certainty. This language is inaccessible in the highest degree to confirmation by any earlier or supra-critical reference point. On the contrary, its internal coherence and its adequacy in respect of the practically possible are what validate the ancient kernel of truth that it restores. Détournement founds its cause on nothing but its own truth as critique at work in the present. Détournement creates anti-statements. For the Situationists, the very act of un-authoritzed appropriation is the truth content of détournement.
Détournement is also completely at odds with Alain Badiou’s concept of truth as a subject’s fidelity to an event – an event which has always passed and of which the subject is the memory. Détournement is not a residue of an event, a formula or a theory. Détournement is a provocation within formulated theory that serves to deny any durable autonomous existence to the sphere of theory merely formulated. The fact that the dislocation of détournement itself mobilizes an action capable of disturbing any existing order is a reminder that the existence of the theoretical domain is nothing in itself, that it can only come to self-knowledge in conjunction with historical action, and that it can only be truly faithful by virtue of history’s corrective judgment upon it. Détournement acts in conjunction with the event, with the coursings of historical time, not after it.
It goes without saying that the best lines in this essay are plagiarized. Or rather, they are detourned – detoured, seduced, hijacked – from various Situationist texts. It hardly counts as plagiarism if the text itself gives notice of its own offense. Moreover many of these detourned phrases have been modified, ‘corrected’, as Lautréamont would say. Hypocrisy is the hush-money that vice pays to virtue. Plagiarism upholds private property in thought by trying to hide its ‘thefts’. Détournement treats all of culture as common property to begin with, and opening announces its rights. Moreover, it treats this commons not as an object of reverence, as a collective memory of the best of what was thought and said, but as an active place of agency. Détournement dissolves the rituals of knowledge in an active remembering that calls collective being into existence.
Not surprisingly, organized knowledge has a hard time with it. The decline in critical theory in the postwar years is directly correlated to the refusal to confront détournement as the most consistent approach to a democratic practice of knowledge. The Situationists are the road not taken, and remain a kind of haunting, sacred memory for critical thought, all along the long march from Althusser to Balibar, Ranciere, Butler, Laclau and Badiou. The road not taken poses the difficult question: what if one challenged the organization of knowledge itself? What if, rather than knowledge as a representation of another life, it was that other life? It is perhaps an impossible path to take, and yet it haunts critical theory with its uncharted possibilities. At least it would be a place free of clowns.
Meanwhile, détournement has become a social movement, outside of scholarship, in all but name. Here the Situationists stand as a prophetic pointing of the way towards a collective re-appropriation and modification of the image, an astonishing and as-yet little understood popular re-appropriation of the power of the image. One that need only become conscious of itself to re-imagine the space of knowledge outside of private property. Every kid with a bitorrent client is an unconscious Situationist in the making. What remains is the task of closing the gap between a critical theory gone astray, still caught up in the model of knowledge as property, and a popular movement that cannot quite develop its own consciousness of its own power.