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

