Debord (1956) - A User's Guide to Détournement
From Inventiopedia
Debord, Guy and Gil Wolman (2006) "A User's Guide to Détournement". In Ken Knabb (ed.) Situationist International Anthology. Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets. First published 1956 in Les Lèvres Nues #8.
In this short article the authors present the technique of détournement, explained by the translator as "deflection, diversion, rerouting, distortion, misuse, misappropriation, hijacking, or otherwise turning something aside from its normal course or purpose".
The authors do not offer a definition or any precise explanation of what they mean - this is the most direct explanation of the concept I could find:
Any elements, no matter where they are taken from, can be used to make new combinations. The discoveries of modern poetry regarding the analogical structure of images demonstrate that when two objects are brought together, no matter how far apart their original contexts may be, a relationship is always formed. Restricting oneself to a personal arrangement of words is mere convention. The mutual interference of two worlds of feeling, or the juxtaposition of two independent expressions, supersedes the original elements and produces a synthetic organization of greater efficacy. Anything can be used.
From this description, détournement seems to be simply an aesthetic technique related to montage, citation, pastiche, parody etc. However, the authors make it clear that this technique is to be put to use for a specific purpose:
The literary and artistic heritage of humanity should be used for partisan propaganda purposes. It is, of course, necessary to go beyond any idea of mere scandal. Since opposition to the bourgeois notion of art and artistic genius has become pretty much old hat, [Marcel Duchamp’s] drawing of a mustache on the Mona Lisa is no more interesting than the original version of that painting. We must now push this process to the point of negating the negation.
And the idea is certainly not to be funny, but to pursue serious political/artistic goals:
Such parodistic methods have often been used to obtain comical effects. But such humor is the result of contradictions within a condition whose existence is taken for granted. Since the world of literature seems to us almost as distant as the Stone Age, such contradictions don’t make us laugh. It is thus necessary to envisage a parodic-serious stage where the accumulation of detourned elements, far from aiming to arouse indignation or laughter by alluding to some original work, will express our indifference toward a meaningless and forgotten original, and concern itself with rendering a certain sublimity.
The authors distinguish between two kinds of détournement, minor and deceptive.
Minor détournement is the détournement of an element which has no importance in itself and which thus draws all its meaning from the new context in which it has been placed. For example, a press clipping, a neutral phrase, a commonplace photograph.
Deceptive détournement [...] is in contrast the détournement of an intrinsically significant element, which derives a different scope from the new context. A slogan of Saint-Just, for example, or a film sequence from Eisenstein.
And just to drive home the idea of the political programme behind these ideas:
Détournement not only leads to the discovery of new aspects of talent; in addition, clashing head-on with all social and legal conventions, it cannot fail to be a powerful cultural weapon in the service of a real class struggle. The cheapness of its products is the heavy artillery that breaks through all the Chinese walls of understanding. It is a real means of proletarian artistic education, the first step toward a literary communism.
[note: "The authors are detourning a sentence from the Communist Manifesto: “The cheapness of the bourgeoisie’s commodities is the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate.”"]
--Anders Sundnes Løvlie 16:52, 23 April 2010 (UTC)
