Give praise to the Situationists. The grandfathers of our modern day counter-culture – graffiti, culture-jamming, and the remix. I should probably approach this from a more neutral point of view for academic purposes and not to mention the way Guy Debord writes (with hope its only the translation…) but there is something extremely exciting about the premise of Détournement.
You could say that the 20th century was the beginning of modern man, it brought great war, tremendous prosperity, and innovation on all levels at speeds never before thought possible. We have yet to truly distinguish ourselves in the 21st as being something other than the continuation of their successes, that’s debatable and surely there is time for that later. It greatest accomplishment, which made it the powerhouse it was other than being later in time than previous centuries, was the industrial revolution whose fruition really become apparent in the first 20 years. That said one thing we did not account for, and why would the capitalist mindset even provide time for its consideration, was the psyche of modern man in such a world. It seems to me that this may be the subconscious, if you will, origin of the Situationist International and Guy Debord. Sure, there were the Dadaists, Surrealists, and Expressionists whose ideologies must have had influence upon them. But it was the world, the modern man, the production, the advertisements, the boring walls, and the stereotypical. The desire to slap others awake and say “look how fucking boring this is!” Insert Détournement, an idea to subvert the Pop and the commercial and inspire one to question “why?” Through the daily life of modern man we are barraged by the propaganda of the machine we have created working full circle to hold us down. It is the act of changing the message that catches the imagination and inspires innovation but also awakens one to the emotionless cycle they travel through daily.
It is no difficult jump to see the present day version of such tremendous yet underground thought. Graffiti culture may relate more to the ideals of the Situationists at this point in time than the mindset of the early 80’s graffiti artists bombing train in inner city New York. We hardly even need to justify the relation to Ad-Busters and the whole of culture-jamming. The Remix culture stands not far either pushing for originality in creation through the incorporation and re-appropriation of modern culture in an effort to redefine and re-imagine. The remix artist may be the culmination of the objective side of Détournement, taking and recreating often with more artistically open messages than the original entailed but always relating to the original yet distinctly different. It is the culture-jammers that carry on the Détourned political ideology and passion. While the graffiti or now more properly defined street art world act as the public artist working against the dullness of the modern landscape. These acts carry out the mission of Détournement, for even in the new millennium we are the prisoners of our own creation and mustn’t forget the emotion of daily life.
That said, the horrible genius of modern society is its adaptation to adversity. Where the Situationists may have helped inspire the radical acts in Paris in 1968, in present day the struggle is twice the difficulty. Where once counter-cultures where pushed away and feared for their different views, they are embraced in present day as another market to sell. It is the brilliance of the modern world, make the counter-culture consumer-culture. As hard as the street artists, culture-jammers, and remix artists attempt to stand against the dreary sight of over produced, over advertised, thoughtless culture creating the stereotypical, boring, and emotionless the more excited people are to include it and dilute it into the mass until the threat is no more. The Détournement is Détourning the Détourners. The guises of the modern system make you expect to see someone countering the mass in such a way that it is an included paradigm as if just another aspect of the algorithm that predicts a stereotypical life.
mid riff note 