Détournement and the Form-Content Binary

Anselm Jappe
Guy Debord (1993)
trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (1999)

...Debord's whole conception of society is founded on détournement: all the elements needed for a free life are already at hand, both culturally and technologically speaking; they have merely to be modified as to their meanings, and organized differently. (61)

In other words, nothing is new under the sun; but does that truism point to the Timelessness of what we've always had, or to its changeability via being "modified as to [its] meanings, and organized differently"? That question indicates that the form-content distinction is maintained intact here; or perhaps materials-process (i.e. "elements"-"meanings") would be more accurate. In any case, if such a distinction were specious or unimportant, it would certainly not be necessary to recapitulate it the way this passage does. And if it is thus indicated to be meaningful, the next question is why this should be so. There are several answers, I think: the statement is far less controversial with regard to production/consumption than it is regarding culture; it is less controversial regarding a Bird's Eye View of society broadly than it is regarding individuals, for whom production/creativity/agency of the type said here to be superfluous may in fact be a basic human (i.e. psychological) need; and is every artefact just this amenable to having its meaning reframed (willfully) by individuals and/or groups according to the ephemeral needs of the moment?

[from a post-it, 2017 or 2018]

Détourn or Deform?

"A Maximum of Openness: Jacqueline de Jong in conversation with Karen Kurczynski"
in Expect Anything Fear Nothing (2011)
ed. Rasmussen and Jakobsen
p. 195

JdJ: ... If you look at it, you can see that I printed it in the smallest font possible so that no one could read it. And it was on purpose. I was already at that moment not very happy with the guys in Drakabygget, mainly Thorsen, I must say. The Drakabygget people were making détournements of articles of mine, such as "Gog and Magog," in their magazine. They even did it with articles by Jorn. You could say there was a degree of faking in what they were doing. One thing that has not been mentioned is that we, the Situationists, always had an anti-copyright declaration in all the magazines. ... Of course it means that everything is permitted, but you don't expect your comrades to deform your texts as they were meant to be serious.

KK: Deform or détourn?

JdJ: Deform, I think. It's a good question.

Vincent Kaufmann on Détournement

Kaufmann/Bononno, Guy Debord

It's true that détournement is also based on a technique of dissimulation, if we insist on using the term, even though it would be more correct to speak of it as a ruse or feint. But it is at the very least problematic to attribute such a technique to the practice—considered shameful or inadmissable— of autobiography, a larvatus prodeo to which no more than a handful of self-proclaimed scholars hold the key. Reading Debord is not like a game of Trivial Pursuit, and I doubt that he was the least bit ashamed of his image or self-portraits. The concept of détournement entails the notion of detour, the intent to circumvent an obstacle, and contains elements of game playing and warfare. Détournement turns the reader or public into a warrior. It incorporates a strategy of blurring appearances, the rejection of comparative quotation demanded by the spectacle, which is currently so intrigued by the cliché of authenticity. Consequently, it also involves a rejection of an entire order of discourse, a logic of allocation, of pigeonholing, of signatures and responsibility through which everyone is in some way put back in his place or finds himself back there. But Debord, the lost child, did everything he could to avoid discovery, to not remain in his place. The spectacle has made authenticity a cliché we are assigned to, it continuously demands that we signal our presence. It is this imperative that détournement rebuffs; it is also, and perhaps especially, a technique of appropriation (which has never concealed its intentions), a technique for making the best possible use of words and texts. "Plagiarism implies progress," wrote Ducasse, it's least improbable inventor, a man Debord deeply admired. With détournement the cliché is taken over for special purposes, as were the Sorbonne much later and, more ephemerally, the Odéon Theater and a handful of factories. There was jubilation rather than dissimulation, none of the sorrow associated with hidden mastery. A challenge was launched against the cliché by a singularity whose self-rediscovery involved abandoning the cliché and reappropriating the belle langue of the century, as Baudelaire—here appropriated—had wanted to do. And Baudelaire, like Debord, was horrified by philanthropic journalists short on inspiration, who wanted to be considered equals or even friends. Charity leads to the spectacle, religiosity to the religious. (37)

dissimulate (v.)—"to hide under a false appearance"
(merriam-webster.com)
larvatus prodeo—something about a mask (The Internet)
feint — (n.) "a deceptive or pretended blow, thrust, or other movement, especially in boxing or fencing" (Google)
So, for VK it is "more correct" (37) to speak of détournement specifically as a tactical maneuver in a physical confrontation ("feint"), or as a "ruse," which seems not all that different from a "dissimulation." One can only hope that something was lost in translation here, because the difference seems stylistic rather than substantive. And the concept further "entails the notion of the detour, the intent to circumvent an obstacle" (37), from which it follows that the nature of the obstacle in question and one's reasons for attempting circumvention are factors which ineluctably color any potential judgment of the maneuver. In this case the obstacle is "comparative quotation [as] demanded by the spectacle," the "cliché of authenticity," "allocation," "pigeonholing," "signatures and responsibility" (37); in short, the way the spectacle "continuously demands that we signal our presence." (38) Fair enough as a goal, I think, but appropriating existing material seems at best a curious means, at worst an impotent one. Can one's location/presence not be triangulated perfectly well (or well enough) from a series of appropriative maneuvers as from ostensibly original ones? Certainly for me coming to this oeuvre without much of any common background with Debord et al, the attributed references are jarring enough on account of this dynamic as to constantly remind me of the author's presence in a different time and place, while the unattributed passages may as well not be appropriations at all since I'll never catch them. Which is to say that Debord, like most authors who for whatever reason continue to command our attention, is no more or less formed/defined/limited by the unique profile of his intellectual pedigree. That this dynamic is through appropriation manifested as a sort of jigsaw puzzle rather than as a tapestry of Influences is rather meaningless vis-a-vis tactical combat with the spectacle, to which both modus operandi signal one's proverbial presence perfectly adequately. Failing that line of reasoning being convincing, it is a simpler route perhaps to point out that Debord signed plenty of his works with his own name, and that unsigned or pseudonymous works, as VK occasionally chronicles below, while certainly part of Debord's toolkit were the exception rather than the rule.

As for "making the best possible use of words and texts" (38), this is segued into rather facilely as if it were an obvious implication of the above, but I would insist that as a question of valuation (comparative!) it is certainly not so simple. At best this position hews to one far-off endpoint of a continuum, at the other end of which lies the whole-cloth ideal which is responsible for supplying the plagiarist's ammunition in the first place. i.e. There is nothing to plagiarize (or nothing fresh and unspoiled) without the products of the whole cloth conceit, and similarly no getting off the ground for practitioners of this conceit without first making a certain peace with the inevitability of influence and the fact of its multiple pathways to manifestation. This much is noncontroversial; but to posit appropriation as the search for an ideal repurposing opens up another, discrete can of worms. Certainly the unquestioned reverence for an author's use of his/her own material is neither necessary nor constructive; this phenomenon (The Composer's Intent is a pop-musicological phrase which comes to mind) would seem to fall under the heading of "authenticity" as it appears in the text here, and the problematizing of this impulse on grounds of resistance to The Spectacle certainly is timely and proper. But the same principles which support an irreverence for authenticity point equally clearly and strongly toward an irreverence for the appropriator's conceit to having found, if not the "best possible use" (!!), then even a better one, quote-unquote, than anyone else (the original, "authentic" author included) has or could. The end run around this obstacle is of course to objectify such value based on function within a social system. This is exactly what VK seems to be claiming Debord was interested in. If that is so, I think that is precisely where the Intentional Fallacy can rightly be called. There is no way to control the reception of such a work by anything as complex as even the most rudimentary social system worthy of the name.

[from a notebook, 2017]

Détournement as Resistance to Ownership of the Commons

McKenzie Wark
The Beach Beneath the Street (2011)

pp.40-41—Détournement as resistance to ownership of the commons

The only problem I have with this is that it deprives the person making the reclamation of the transformative struggle which comes with striving for a unique, original accomplishment. Perhaps wholesale appropriations are crucial for their potential to remind collective society of its collective aspects; but the perpetrator has, as I take Debord to have said repeatedly, not accomplished much for themselves. They have Never Worked in one important sense, and again, while someone's gotta do it, a whole mess of such someone's isn't socially sustainable.

[from a post-it, 2017]

[The passage:]

Michel Foucault (1926-84) undermines the romantic theory of authorship by speaking of discourse as a distribution of author functions. For Foucault, a statement is authorized by a particular form of discourse, a regime of truth, a procedure for assigning truth-value to statements. It's not hard to see why this captivated the minds of academics. It made the procedures in which academics are obsessively drilled the very form of power itself. As if that by which academics are made, the molding of their bodies to desks and texts, that about which they know the most, even more than they know their allotted fields, were the very index of power. Reading Foucault is like taking a masterclass on how the game of academic scholarship is to be played, and with the reliable alibi that this knowledge of power, of knowledge as power, is to be used in the interests of resistance to something or other. Détournement, on the other hand, turns the tables, upends the game.

The device of détournement restores all the subversive qualities to past critical judgments that have congealed into respectable truths. Détournement makes for 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 symbolic remnants that it restores. Détournement founds its cause on nothing but its own practice as a critique at work in the present. Détournement creates anti-statements. For the Situationists, the very act of unauthorized appropriation is the truth content of détournement. (40-41)

Debord and Wolman—Détournement

Guy Debord and Gil J Wolman
"A User's Guide to Détournement" (1956)
in Situationist International Anthology (2006)
trans. and ed. Ken Knabb
pp. 14-21

It is not just returning to the past which is reactionary; even "modern" cultural objectives are ultimately reactionary since they depend on ideological formulations of a past society that has prolonged its death agony to the present. The only historically justified tactic is extremist innovation. (14)

Unfortunately it is not only our various underlying "ideological formulations" which are products of the past but also the whole of our knowledge. Hence "extremist innovation" can be extreme only relative to current conditions; it cannot be any more or less rooted in the dead past than can any other point on this continuum.

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.

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 reference to "citations." (15)

Imbeciles being now and forever a sizable majority, I would imagine the fate of this device to be thusly sealed. If the artist has such high (that is, concrete) hopes for their productions, then it is up to them to design imbecile-proof strategies for realization of this objective. Even the notion that "a relationship is always formed" is perhaps too charitable; some relationship or other may arise, but different imbeciles may harbor different imbecilities; and in extreme cases the "juxtaposition" itself may not be perceptible, or not equally to all. Again, the specificity of the intent necessitates a proportionate degree of responsibility taken by the artist. One does not detect a great deal of affinity here with the notion of responsibility, however.

the tendencies toward détournement that can be observed in contemporary expression are for the most part unconscious or accidental. It is in the advertising industry, more than in the domain of decaying aesthetic production, that one can find the best examples. (16)

A strikingly early mention of the affinity between marketing and pastiche. Much later, J. Wagner would remark in class that by the late 1980s Hollywood literally "couldn't afford NOT" to incorporate bits and pieces of damn near everything. So there is something prophetic here, but also a motivated inability to dig deeper and ask whether the appearance of these techniques first in the area of marketing is ACTUALLY accidental/unconscious, or whether the techniques are not in fact DEFINED by this marketing orientation. And from there it is but a small step to question the conceit to a total fluidity of relationships between détourned elements; if this were possible, advertising would not be limited to a few very particular tropes, nor would the industry need to expend nearly so much effort researching in order to determine which tropes might work.

the main impact of a détournement is directly related to the conscious or semiconscious recollection of the original contexts of the elements.

...

The idea of pure, absolute expression is dead... (17)

A characteristically Debordian irreverence for engaging with dynamic social processes on their own terms is very much on display here. He can see that absolute expression is dead, but not that "original contexts are every bit as dynamic and varied. The theory of détournement is every bit as dependent on being grounded at some archimedean point as is the romantic conception of expressive communication through artworks. Far from rejecting pure/absolute expression, the authors seem intent on using the pure/absolute/monolithic element in stultified marketing-oriented culture as a springboard to communicate tractability. And yet as monolithic as mass culture seems to get, this has remained impossible.

Détournement is less effective the more it approaches a rational reply. ... The more the rational character of the reply is apparent, the more indistinguishable it becomes from the ordinary spirit of repartee... (17)

Very true as far as it goes, but this should also be a clue that this is, as the above points would have it, not very far at all. If the "rational" and the semantic spoil the fun, this is because their own conceits to objectivity are immediately exploded when deployed in this way. The various irr-/pseudo-rational alternatives are not more effective, they merely conceal the process more completely, protecting their conceits.

It is a real means of proletarian artistic education, the first step toward a literary communism. (18)

This seems about right, actually. A "first step" in the sense of being inherently elementary, juvenile, unripe. Yet still the authors are ambiguous on the question of agency: is the prole to practice détournement as a vehicle of social and cultural agency, or merely to passively consume the expertly crafted détournements of Debord and Wolman according to the "laws" set down in these pages?

...Griffith's Birth of a Nation is one of the most important films in the history of cinema because of its wealth of innovations. 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 détourn 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 activiites of the Ku Klux Klan... (19)

A smart and totally reasonable proposal which has become, alas, completely untenable on account of the trigger warning crowd, and also by way of what R. Gombin calls "total contestation." Debord having had a hand in establishing the latter, and also in declaring the death of film years before this article appeared, one wonders if this passage is not an instance of Wolman getting a word in edgewise. In any case, the Trigger Warning phenomenon is an apt devil's advocate avenue for contemporary skeptics of the cult of détournement, since it renders the proposal here totally untenable, intentions be damned.

In itself, the theory of détournement 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. (21)

The reluctant virtuoso defers. Détournement is simply an idea whose time has come. Artistic innovation, expression, and aesthetics are no longer possible, hence a bounded inventory of cultural artefacts with stable meanings from which may be selected and juxtaposed any and all of them according not to the personal whim of the artist but to the demands of the political situation.

[from a notebook, probably 2018]