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METHODS OF DETOURNEMENT*
All aware people of our time agree that art can no longer be justified
as a superior activity, or even as an activity of compensation to which
one could honorably devote oneself The cause of this deterioration is
clearly the emergence of productive forces that necessitate other
production relations and a new practice of life. In the civil war phase
we are engaged in, and in close connection with the orientation we are
discovering for certain superior activities to come, we can consider
that all known means of expression are going to converge in a general
movement of propaganda which must encompass all the perpetually
interacting aspects of social reality.
Regarding the forms and even the very nature of educative propaganda,
there are several conflicting opinions, generally inspired by one or
another currently fashionable variety of reformist politics. Suffice it
to say that in our view the premises for revolution, on the cultural as
well as the strictly political level, are not only ripe, they have begun
to rot. It is not just returning to the past which is reactionary; even
"modern" cultural objectives are ultimately reactionary since they
depend in reality on ideological formulations of a past society that has
prolonged its death agony to the present. Only extremist innovation is
historically justified.
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 scandal. Since the negation of the bourgeois conception of
art and artistic genius has become pretty much old hat, [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. Bertolt Brecht, revealing in a recent
interview in the magazine France-Observateur that he made some cuts in
the classics of the theater in order to make the performances more
educative, is much closer than Duchamp to the revolutionary orientation
we are calling for. We must note, however, that in Brecht's case these
salutary alterations are held within narrow limits by his unfortunate
respect for culture as defined by the ruling class-- that same respect,
taught in the primary schools of the bourgeoisie and in the newspapers
of the workers parties, which leads the reddest worker districts of
Paris always to prefer The Cid over Mother Courage.
In fact, it is necessary to finish with any notion of personal property
in this area. The appearance of new necessities outmodes previous
"inspired" works. They become obstacles, dangerous habits. The point is
not whether we like them or not. We have to go beyond them.
Any elements, no matter where they are taken from, can serve in making
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 bringing together of two independent
expressions, supersedes the original elements and produces a synthetic
organization of greater efficacy. Anything can be used.
It goes without saying that one is not limited to correcting a work or
to integrating diverse fragments of out-of-date works into a new one;
one can also alter the meaning of those fragments in any appropriate
way, leaving the imbeciles to their slavish preservation of "citations."
Such parodical 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 therefore necessary to conceive of a parodic serious stage
where the accumulation of detourned elements, far from aiming at
arousing 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.
Lautreamont advanced so far in this direction that he is still partly
misunderstood even by his most ostentatious admirers. In spite of his
obvious application of this method to theoretical language in Poesies
(drawing particularly on the ethical maxims of Pascal and Vauvenargues)
where Lautreamont strives to reduce the argument, through successive
concentrations, to maxims alone--a certain Viroux caused considerable
astonishment three or four years ago by demonstrating conclusively that
Maldoror is one vast detournement of Buffon and other works of natural
history, among other things. That the prosaists of Figaro, such as this
Viroux himself, were able to see this as a justification for disparaging
Lautreamont, and that others believed they had to defend him by praising
his insolence, only testifies to the intellectual debility of these two
camps of dotards in courtly combat with each other. A slogan like
"Plagiarism is necessary, progress implies it" is still as poorly
understood, and for the same reasons, as the famous phrase about the
poetry that "must be made by all."
Apart from Lautreamont's work--whose appearance so far ahead of its time
has to a great extent preserved it from a precise critique--the
tendencies toward detournement that can be observed in contemporary
expression are for the most part unconscious or incidental; and it is in
the advertising industry, more than in a decaying aesthetic production,
that one can find the best examples.
We can first of all define two main categories of detourned elements,
without considering whether or not their being brought together is
accompanied by corrections introduced in the originals. These are minor
detournements and deceptive detournements.
Minor detournement is the detournement 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 detournement, also termed premonitory proposition
detournement, is in contrast the detournement of an intrinsically
significant element, which derives a different scope from the new
context. A slogan of Saint-Just, for example, or a sequence from Eisenstein.
Extended detourned works will thus usually be composed of one or more
sequences of deceptive and minor detournements. Several laws on the use
of detournement can now be formulated:
It is the most distant detourned element which contributes most sharply
to the overall impression, and not the elements that directly determine
the nature of this impression. For example, in a metagraph [poem-collage]
relating to the Spanish Civil War the phrase with the most distinctly
revolutionary sense is a fragment from a lipstick ad: "Pretty lips are
red." In another metagraph ("The Death of J.H.") 125 classified ads of
bars for sale express a suicide more strikingly than the newspaper
articles that recount it.
The distortions introduced in the detourned elements must be as
simplified as possible, since the main force of a detournement is
directly related to the conscious or vague recollection of the original
contexts of the elements. This is well known. Let us simply note that if
this dependence on memory implies that one must determine one's public
before devising a detournement, this is only a particular case of a
general law that governs not only detournement but also any other form
of action on the world. The idea of pure, absolute expression is dead;
it only temporarily survives in parodic form as long as our other
enemies survive.
Detournement is less effective the more it approaches a rational reply.
This is the case with a rather large number of Lautreamont's altered
maxims. The more the rational character of the reply is apparent, the
more indistinguishable it becomes from the ordinary spirit of repartee,
which similarly uses the opponent's words against him. This is naturally
not limited to spoken language. It was in this connection that we
objected to the project of some of our comrades who proposed to detourn
an anti-Soviet poster of the fascist organization "Peace and
Liberty"--which proclaimed, amid images of overlapping flags of the
Western powers, "Union makes strength"--by adding onto it a smaller
sheet with the phrase "and coalitions make war."
Detournement by simple reversal is always the most direct and the least
effective. Thus, the Black Mass reacts against the construction of an
ambiance based on a given metaphysics by constructing an ambiance in the
same framework that merely reverses--and thus simultaneously
conserves--the values of that metaphysics. Such reversals may
nevertheless have a certain progressive aspect. For example, Clemenceau
[called "The Tiger"] could be referred to as "The Tiger called Clemenceau."
Of the four laws that have just been set forth, the first is essential
and applies universally. The other three are practically applicable only
to deceptive detourned elements.
The first visible consequences of a widespread use of detournement,
apart from its intrinsic propaganda powers, will be the revival of a
multitude of bad books, and thus the extensive (unintended)
participation of their unknown authors; an increasingly extensive
transformation of sentences or plastic works that happen to be in
fashion; and above all an ease of production far surpassing in quantity,
variety and quality the automatic writing that has bored us so much.
Detournement not only leads to the discovery of new aspects of talent;
it 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.
Ideas and realizations in the realm of detournement can be multiplied at
will. For the moment we will limit ourselves to showing a few concrete
possibilities starting from various current sectors of communication--it
being understood that these separate sectors are significant only in
relation to present-day techniques, and are all tending to merge into
superior syntheses with the advance of these techniques.
Apart from the various direct uses of detourned phrases in posters,
records or radio broadcasts, the two principal applications of detourned
prose are metagraphic writings and, to a lesser degree, the adroit
perversion of the classical novel form.
There is not much future in the detournement of complete novels, but
during the transitional phase there might be a certain number of
undertakings of this sort. Such a detournement gains by being
accompanied by illustrations whose relationships to the text are not
immediately obvious. In spite of the undeniable difficulties, we believe
it would be possible to produce an instructive psychogeographical
detournement of George Sand's Consuelo, which thus decked out could be
relaunched on the literary market disguised under some innocuous title
like "Life in the Suburbs," or even under a title itself detourned, such
as "The Lost Patrol." (It would be a good idea to reuse in this way many
titles of old deteriorated films of which nothing else remains, or of
films which continue to stupefy young people in the film clubs.)
Metagraphic writing, no matter how backward may be the plastic framework
in which it is materially situated, presents far richer opportunities
for detourning prose, as well as other appropriate objects or images.
One can get some idea of this from the project, devised in 1951 but then
abandoned for lack of sufficient financial means, which envisaged a
pinball machine arranged in such a way that the play of the lights and
the more or less predictable trajectories of the balls would form a
metagraphic-spatial composition entitled Thermal sensations and desires
of people passing by the gates of the Cluny Museum around an hour after
sunset in November. We have since, of course, come to realize that a
situationist-analytic work cannot scientifically advance by way of such
projects. The means nevertheless remain suitable for less ambitious goals.
It is obviously in the realm of the cinema that detournement can attain
its greatest efficacity, and undoubtedly, for those concerned with this
aspect, its greatest beauty.
The powers of film are so extensive, and the absence of coordination of
those powers is so glaring, that almost any film that is above the
miserable average can provide matter for innumerable polemics among
spectators or professional critics. Only the conformism of those people
prevents them from discovering features just as appealing and faults
just as glaring in the worst films. To cut through this absurd confusion
of values, we can observe that Griffith's Birth of a Nation is one of
the most important films in the history of the cinema because of its
wealth of new contributions. On the other hand, it is a racist film and
therefore absolutely does not merit being shown in its present form. But
its total prohibition could be seen as regrettable from the point of
view of the secondary, but potentially worthier, domain of the cinema.
It would be better to detourn it as a whole, without necessarily even
altering the montage, by adding a soundtrack that made a powerful
denunciation of the horrors of imperialist war and of the activities of
the Ku Klux Klan, which are continuing in the United States even now.
Such a detournement--a very moderate one--is in the final analysis
nothing more than the moral equivalent of the restoration of old
paintings in museums. But most films only merit being cut up to compose
other works. This reconversion of preexisting sequences will obviously
be accompanied by other elements, musical or pictorial as well as
historical. While the filmic rewriting of history has until now been
largely along the lines of Guitry's burlesque recreations, one could
have Robespierre say, before his execution: "In spite of so many trials,
my experience and the grandeur of my task convinces me that all is
well." If in this case a judicious revival of Greek tragedy serves us in
exalting Robespierre, we can conversely imagine a neorealist sort of
sequence, at the counter of a truckstop bar, for example, with one of
the truckdrivers saying seriously to another: "Ethics was in the books
of the philosophers; we have introduced it into the governing of
nations." One can see that this juxtaposition illuminates Maximilien's
idea,* the idea of a dictatorship of the proletariat.
The light of detournement is propagated in a straight line. To the
extent that new architecture seems to have to begin with an experimental
baroque stage, the architectural complex--which we conceive as the
construction of a dynamic environment related to styles of
behavior--will probably detourn existing architectural forms, and in any
case will make plastic and emotional use of all sorts of detourned
objects: calculatedly arranged cranes or metal scaffolding replacing a
defunct sculptural tradition. This is shocking only to the most fanatic
admirers of French-style gardens. It is said that in his old age
D'Annunzio, that pro-fascist swine, had the prow of a torpedo boat in his
park. Leaving aside his patriotic motives, the idea of such a monument is
not without a certain charm.
If detournement were extended to urbanistic realizations, not many
people would remain unaffected by an exact reconstruction in one city of
an entire neighborhood of another. Life can never be too disorienting:
detournements on this level would really make it beautiful.
Titles themselves, as we have already seen, are a basic element of
detournement. This follows from two general observations: that all
titles are interchangeable and that they have a determinant importance
in several genres. All the detective stories in the "Serie Noir" are
extremely similar, yet merely continually changing the titles suffices
to hold a considerable audience. In music a title always exerts a great
influence, yet the choice of one is quite arbitrary. Thus it wouldn't be
a bad idea to make a final correction to the title of the "Eroica
Symphony" by changing it, for example, to "Lenin Symphony."
The title contributes strongly to a work, but there is an inevitable
counteraction of the work on the title. Thus one can make extensive use
of specific titles taken from scientific publications ("Coastal Biology
of Temperate Seas") or military ones ("Night Combat of Small Infantry
Units"), or even of many phrases found in illustrated children's books
("Marvelous Landscapes Greet the Voyagers").
In closing, we should briefly mention some aspects of what we call
ultradetournement, that is, the tendencies for detournement to operate
in everyday social life. Gestures and words can be given other
meanings, and have been throughout history for various practical
reasons. The secret societies of ancient China made use of quite subtle
recognition signals encompassing the greater part of social behavior
(the manner of arranging cups; of drinking; quotations of poems
interrupted at agreed-on points). The need for a secret language, for
passwords, is inseparable from a tendency toward play. Ultimately, any
sign or word is susceptible to being converted into something else, even
into its opposite. The royalist insurgents of the Vendee, because they
bore the disgusting image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, were called the
Red Army. In the limited domain of political war vocabulary this
expression was completely detourned within a century.
Outside of language, it is possible to use the same methods to detourn
clothing, with all its strong emotional connotations. Here again we find
the notion of disguise closely linked to play. Finally, when we have got
to the stage of constructing situations, the ultimate goal of all our
activity, it will be open to everyone to detourn entire situations by
deliberately changing this or that determinant condition of them.
The methods that we have briefly dealt with here are presented not as
our own invention, but as a generally widespread practice which we
propose to systematize.
In itself, the theory of detournement scarcely interests us. But we
find it linked to almost all the constructive aspects of the
presituationist period of transition. Thus its enrichment, through
practice seems necessary.
We will postpone the development of these theses until later.
GUY DEBORD, GIL J. WOLMAN
From Les Levres Nues #8, May 1956