A User’s Guide to Détournement
Tradução de Ken Knabb do original
em francês escrito por Guy Debord e Gil Wolman
Every reasonably aware person of our time is aware of the obvious fact that art
can no longer be justified as a superior activity, or even as a compensatory
activity to which one might honorably devote oneself. The reason for 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 believe that all known means of
expression are going to converge in a general movement of propaganda that
must encompass all the perpetually interacting aspects of social reality.
There are several conflicting opinions about the forms and even the very nature
of educative propaganda, opinions that generally reflect 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 on ideological formulations of a past society that
has prolonged its death agony to the present. The only historically justified
tactic is extremist innovation.
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. Bertolt Brecht, revealing in a recent interview in France-
Observateur that he makes 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 narrowly limited by his unfortunate
respect for culture as defined by the ruling class — that same respect, taught in
the newspapers of the workers parties as well as in the primary schools of the
bourgeoisie, which leads even the reddest worker districts of Paris always to
prefer The Cid over [Brecht’s] Mother Courage.
It is in fact necessary to eliminate all remnants of the 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 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.”
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.
Lautréamont advanced so far in this direction that he is still partially
misunderstood even by his most ostentatious admirers. In spite of his obvious
application of this method to theoretical language in Poésies — where
Lautréamont (drawing particularly on the maxims of Pascal and Vauvenargues)
strives to reduce the argument, through successive concentrations, to maxims
alone — a certain Viroux caused considerable astonishment three or four years
ago by conclusively demonstrating that Maldoror is one vast détournement of
Buffon and other works of natural history, among other things. The fact that the
prosaists of Figaro, like Viroux himself, were able to see this as a justification
for disparaging Lautréamont, and that others believed they had to defend him
by praising his insolence, only testifies to the senility 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.” (2)
Apart from Lautréamont’s work — whose appearance so far ahead of its time
has to a great extent preserved it from a detailed examination — 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.
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
détournements and deceptive détournements.
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, also termed premonitory-proposition 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.
Extensive detourned works will thus usually be composed of one or more series
of deceptive and minor détournements.
Several laws on the use of détournement 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 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.(3)
The distortions introduced in the detourned elements must be as simplified as
possible, since the main impact of a détournement is directly related to the
conscious or semiconscious 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
détournement, this is only a particular case of a general law that governs not
only détournement 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.
Détournement is less effective the more it approaches a rational reply. This is
the case with a rather large number of Lautréamont’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.”
Détournement by simple reversal is always the most direct and the least
effective. Thus, the Black Mass reacts against the construction of an ambience
based on a given metaphysics by constructing an ambience within 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 [nicknamed “The Tiger”] could
be referred to as “The Tiger Named 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 détournement, 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 phrases 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 for so long.
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.(4) It is a real means of proletarian artistic
education, the first step toward a literary communism.
Ideas and creations in the realm of détournement can be multiplied at will. For
the moment we will limit ourselves to showing a few concrete possibilities in
various current sectors of communication — it being understood that these
separate sectors are significant only in relation to present-day technologies, and
are all tending to merge into superior syntheses with the advance of these
technologies.
Apart from the various direct uses of detourned phrases in posters, records and
radio broadcasts, the two main 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 détournement of complete novels, but during
the transitional phase there might be a certain number of undertakings of this
sort. Such a détournement gains by being accompanied by illustrations whose
relationships to the text are not immediately obvious. In spite of undeniable
difficulties, we believe it would be possible to produce an instructive
psychogeographical détournement 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 deteriorated old films of which nothing else remains, or of the films
that continue to deaden the minds of young people in the cinema clubs.)
Metagraphic writing, no matter how outdated its plastic framework may be,
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,
conceived in 1951 but eventually 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 come to realize that a situationist-analytic
enterprise cannot scientifically advance by way of such works. The means
nevertheless remain suitable for less ambitious goals.
It is obviously in the realm of the cinema that détournement can attain its
greatest effectiveness and, 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 virtually any film that is above the miserable average
can provide matter for endless polemics among spectators or professional
critics. Only the conformism of those people prevents them from discovering
equally appealing charms and equally glaring faults even 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 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 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 détournement — 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 cinematic
rewriting of history has until now been largely along the lines of Sacha Guitry’s
burlesque re-creations, 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 an appropriate reuse of a Greek
tragedy enables us to exalt Robespierre, we can conversely imagine a
neorealist-type sequence, at the counter of a truck stop bar, for example, with
one of the truck drivers saying seriously to another: “Ethics was formerly
confined to 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. (5)
The light of détournement 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: careful arrangements of such things as
cranes or metal scaffolding replacing a defunct sculptural tradition. This is
shocking only to the most fanatical 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 détournement 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: détournement on
this level would really spice it up.
Titles themselves, as we have already seen, are a basic element of
détournement. This follows from two general observations: that all titles are
interchangeable and that they have a decisive importance in several genres. The
detective stories in the “Série Noir” are all 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.”(6)
The title contributes strongly to the détournement of 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 ultra-
détournement, that is, the tendencies for détournement 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 Vendée,(7) 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 — everyone will
be free to detourn entire situations by deliberately changing this or that
determinant condition of them.
The methods that we have briefly examined here are presented not as our own
invention, but as a generally widespread practice which we propose to
systematize.
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.
We will postpone the development of these theses until later.
GUY DEBORD, GIL J WOLMAN
1956
[TRANSLATOR’S NOTES]
1. The French word détournement means deflection, diversion, rerouting,
distortion, misuse, misappropriation, hijacking, or otherwise turning something
aside from its normal course or purpose. It has sometimes been translated as
“diversion,” but this word is confusing because of its more common meaning
of idle entertainment. Like most other English-speaking people who have
actually practiced détournement, I have chosen simply to anglicize the French
word.
For more on détournement, see theses 204-209 of The Society of the
Spectacle.
2. The two quoted phrases are from Isidore Ducasse’s Poésies. Lautréamont
was the pseudonym used by Ducasse for his other work, Maldoror. The
“Plagiarism is necessary” passage was later plagiarized by Debord in thesis
#207 of The Society of the Spectacle.
3. The “metagraph,” a genre developed by the lettrists, is a sort of collage with
largely textual elements. The two metagraphs mentioned here are both by
Debord, and can be found in his Oeuvres (p. 127).
4. 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.”
5. In the first imagined scene a phrase from a Greek tragedy
(Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus) is put in the mouth of French Revolution
leader Maximilien Robespierre. In the second, a phrase from Robespierre is put
in the mouth of a truck driver.
6. Beethoven originally named his third symphony after Napoleon (seen as a
defender of the French Revolution), but when Napoleon crowned himself
emperor he angrily tore up the dedication to him and renamed it “Eroica.”
The implied respect in this passage for Lenin (like the passing references to
“workers states” in Debord’s “Report on the Construction of Situations”) is a
vestige of the lettrists’ early, less politically sophisticated period, when they
seem to have been sort of anarcho-Trotskyist.
7. The Vendée: region in southwestern France, locale of a pro-monarchist revolt
against the Revolutionary government (1793-1796).
