Situationism: The Art of Détournement

It’s been a while since we last talked about Situationism, that giddy fusion of radical politics and performance art that seized the imaginations of a certain fraction of the European avant-garde in the 1960s. (Readers who missed those discussions the first time around, or simply want to review what’s been covered, will find those earlier posts here, here, here, here, and here.) I freely admit that a gaggle of mid-twentieth century European hipsters who spent more time getting drunk and bickering with one another than doing much of anything else may seem unlikely as a source of useful ideas just now, as industrial society lurches from crisis to crisis on its way down the long slope of decline. Still, raw weirdness has a power as well as a charm of its own. Weirdness, in turn, the Situationists definitely had.

They also had certain practical methods that can be turned to uses considerably more productive than the Situationists themselves ever attempted. As I’ve noted several times already, the Situationists were hamstrung by their historical context as beta-Marxists—that is to say, Marxists living in a society that was already dominated by a bureaucratic-managerial elite, the usual product of Marxism in its more effective alpha-mode. While beta-Marxists inevitably claim to be laboring long and hard to bring about the supposedly inevitable revolution of the proletariat, their actual function in society is to provide disaffected youths from the privileged classes with a harmless way to act out their fantasies of dissidence before reverting to type and embracing the status, the jobs, and the privileges to which their status entitles them.

Providing this service to the bureaucratic-managerial elites places certain requirements on beta-Marxist groups. On the one hand, it is to their advantage to craft the most forceful and cogent critiques of the existing society they possibly can, and thus to help fill out the reserve army of ideas so that the elites will have alternative ideologies in place as needed to cope with unexpected change. On the other hand, beta-Marxists are strictly required to pursue wholly ineffectual methods of social change, so that their antics won’t inconvenience the existing order of society. If you wondered why climate-change activists fling around soup in art museums and engage in other equally pointless and stupid actions, in other words, it’s no accident that they’ve settled on so feckless a choice of methods; their ideologies are descended from beta-Marxism and embody many of its most unproductive features.

The irony is that a few of the methods pioneered by the Situationists actually have considerable potential for individuals interested in embracing more freedom in their own lives. Of course making use of that potential requires those methods to be pried loose from their places in the ersatz theology of Marxism, with its insistence on the imminent proletarian revolution that will solve all the world’s problems. It will require, in fact, a shift of the kind sketched out in the last post in this sequence, The Road from Raswashingsputin, where I used the wholly imaginary nation of Lower Slobbovia to focus attention on the far from imaginary process by which the intended manipulations of collective consciousness by the elite classes have to make their way to individual minds.

As I tried to show there, the closer you get to the collective, the more power the elite classes and their hired sorcerers in media and marketing have; the closer you get to the individual, the easier it is for individual counterspells to frustrate their efforts. Yes, we’re going to talk about one of the counterspells. Its name is détournement, it’s one of the very few aspects of Situationism that still has a robust following today, and next to nobody seems to have noticed that it can be used to create something other than cheap photocopied posters and funny online memes.

Let’s start with the basics. The French word détournement means “diversion;” my Larousse dictionary mentions among other things that it’s the standard French word for embezzlement. To détourn something, to borrow a bit of garbled Franglish, is to put it to some unauthorized use, preferably some use that will trip up the agenda the raw material was originally intended to serve. Back in the day, the Situationists used to do that with the advertising images that were such a pervasive presence in 1950s and 1960s culture: they would take the image and swap out the slogans for something rather less supportive of the existing order of society. That is to say, the Situationists invented the image macro (to use the proper name of today’s internet memes) decades in advance.

More broadly, they applied the same logic to the arts in general. That wasn’t as absurd as it may seem in retrospect. Every artistic tradition has a finite creative space in which to operate, defined by the seminal works that set that tradition in motion. Once Monteverdi picked up the idea of opera from the Florentine Camerata, the little group of amateur musicians who created it, and turned it into the most popular art form of the age, there was a very large but finite number of possible operas that could be written within the space that he and the Camerata jointly defined. Once that space got filled up, which finally took place in the early twentieth century, new operas were either imitations of earlier works or pretentious trash: the space was full.

Every art follows that same trajectory. It so happens, furthermore, that most of the traditional arts of the Western world ran into those limits over the course of the twentieth century. By the century’s dawn, art music, painting, and sculpture had reached the end of their respective roads, and “pretentious trash” makes a very good label for what followed in all three fields. (It’s a running joke today in classical music circles that orchestras perform twentieth century music when they want to do without the many inconveniences of having an audience.) You can jolt an art form back to temporary life by bringing in influences from another culture, which is why jazz flourished so spectacularly in the twentieth century, but it’s a short term fix at best—again, the rapid decline of jazz after the 1960s is a good example.

Poetry and literature both hit similar limits in midcentury, which is why people could make a decent living as full-time poets until the 1950s but you can’t even dream of doing that today, and why “serious” fiction these days has an audience that consists almost entirely of literary critics and the handful of readers who listen to them. Even such new arts as cinema were caught in the undertow and dragged down, as witness the collapse of Hollywood in our time. By the time Situationism flourished, accordingly, most Western art forms were museum pieces; think of classical music, where creativity now takes the form of playing exquisite renditions of pieces composed centuries ago.

That’s normal in every culture, and most societies make the transition from the age of innovation to the age of performance without too much difficulty, even with a sigh of relief. Our culture is uniquely burdened in this context by its obsession with the phantasm of perpetual progress. Even as the arts themselves settle down comfortably into performance mode, with musicians striving to play Bach and Mozart perfectly and writers turning out endless variations on rigidly defined fictional genres—the murder mystery, the bodice-ripping romance, the politician’s press release, and so on—there are always intellectuals who can’t stand the thought that the Western world’s age of creative innovation has run its course in the usual way.

The Situationist concept of détournement formalized one of the more creative responses to that predicament. When a small boy hangs a discarded urinal on a nail on some nearby fence, it’s a practical joke; when Marcel Duchamp submitted a discarded urinal to an important gallery show, the critics swooned and described it as one of the most important works of twentieth century art. They weren’t wrong, because the vast majority of twentieth century art was even less interesting than the random piece of used plumbing Duchamp used for his prank. When an artistic tradition has exhausted the creative space available to it, playing sly games with the boundaries of the tradition is one of the few things you can do that won’t elicit yawns.

This, in turn, the Situationists took as their basic artistic mode. Even among that small subset of people who still remember the Situationists, not that many recall where the movement got its name. The idea was that constructing entire situations was one of the few artistic options that hadn’t been done to death by the 1960s. Duchamp did that some decades further back by putting his upended urinal in a major art show, redefining the urinal by putting it into a more prestigious situation than such things usually occupy. The same thing can also be done, however, by taking an existing artwork and putting it into a new situation, so that its changed context redefines the experience and meaning of the work.

That’s what an image macro does, by taking an existing image and applying new text to it to make a point the maker of the image probably didn’t have in mind. That’s also what the Situationists did when they took images from the advertising media of their time and slapped new captions on those images to mess with the heads of the viewers. That’s détournement. It’s a clever strategy, and one that can be applied far beyond its original artistic context.

Let’s follow the possibilities out a certain distance by applying détournement to technology. The first thing that has to be done to make sense of this is to discard the absurd and dishonest (though endlessly repeated) claim that technologies are or can ever be value-free. As John Ellis showed with great clarity in his 1986 book The Social History of the Machine Gun, every technology necessarily embodies the values of the people who design it, manufacture it, and market it—otherwise it would never be designed, manufactured, or marketed at all.

Every technology is good for some things, and thus furthers whatever agendas are advanced by those things, and bad for other things, and thus hinders whatever competing agendas those other things might have favored. Since technologies don’t simply appear out of thin air, in turn, the political, economic, and cultural leaders who influence the decision to invest in this technology and not that one pick and choose the technological options they support from among those that advance their own interests and disadvantage those of their opponents. When people babble about “what technology wants,” in turn, they’re either impressively clueless or they’re engaged in tactical camouflage, since very often the agendas being advanced by this or that technology are not things anyone in power wants to discuss publicly.

By the time any technology makes its way to market and becomes accessible to individuals, as a result, that technology has become a vehicle for specific interests and agendas. To buy and use any technology in the normal way of things is therefore tantamount to supporting those interests and acquiescing in those agendas. That’s how it’s supposed to work, at least, and in many cases that’s exactly how it works. You can see just how much the current political-economic system depends on that process once you notice just how shrill the system and its more privileged inmates get when they encounter people who refuse to buy into any given technology.

The reaction’s not unreasonable. As we discussed in earlier posts, the “magician states” of the modern industrial world depend to a very large extent on the voluntary obedience of the masses, who are lured into that obedience by the evil sorceries we call advertising and marketing. Those who refuse to participate are a threat to the system because they’ve become resistant to its spells; being protected from evil magic in one way or another, they decide for themselves which products and services they want to use, rather than having that decision made for them by the sorcerers of marketing agencies.

Refusal is a powerful magic, but it’s not the only option. Another way of dealing with the interests and agendas hardwired into technologies is détournement.

I’ll use a personal example here, because I learned to détourn technologies long before I’d first read about the Situationists. It so happens, for example, that I own a battered but functional used Kindle ebook reader. Ebooks are a great example of a technology with its own built-in interests and agendas, not least because many ebooks aren’t sold, they’re rented, and can be deleted by the seller at any moment. Back when ebooks were still being promoted as the wave of the future, the major ebook providers made no secret of their intention to elbow printed books out of the market. Their motivations were no mystery, either: if most readers had allowed themselves to be herded into ebooks, that same handful of major providers would have had nearly complete control of what people could read, and would have been able to slam the door on alternative views, edit what information resources were available, and push whatever agendas they wanted.

It didn’t work. The most important reason it didn’t work was the simple fact that too many readers didn’t go along with the corporate agenda. Some refused to get into ebooks at all; others tried it and decided they liked printed books better; but there were also people who détourned the new technology and put it to uses that tripped up the corporate agenda in various ways. I belong to this last group. I’ve never bought an ebook and, though I have a used Kindle, I’ve never downloaded a book from the giant corporation that owns and exploits that franchise. It so happens that there are several online archives, most famously Project Gutenberg, that make old, out-of-copyright books available in the major ebook formats for free. That’s what goes on my Kindle: unfashionable books by dead people. It’s a convenient reference collection, and it also gives me something to read when I’m going somewhere via train or bus.

Am I waving this about as some kind of evidence of virtue? Of course not. It’s simply a rather mild example of how a technology can be used in ways that sidestep (or fling down and trample on) the corporate agenda it’s intended to push. It’s important, for that matter, not to overstate the potentials of détournement. Not all technologies can be détourned effectively, and there are always hard limits to how far you can détourn anything. There are also situations in which refusal is the more effective option. That’s why I haven’t owned a television in my adult life, for example. Again, that’s not presented as some sort of evidence of virtue; instead, in my case, it’s the product of a reasoned assessment that the agendas being pushed by the technology of broadcast television are so toxic, and the effort needed to détourn the technology so large, that for me, refusal is simply the better choice

In the case of ebooks, the calculation runs the other way. That doesn’t mean that I can do whatever I want with ebook technology, of course. My ability to détourn the Kindle technology is tightly constrained by the technology itself (if it’s not a .mobi file my device won’t read it) and by other factors over which I have little or no control (there are only a handful of providers of old freeware books). Within limits such as these, however, it’s sometimes possible to take a technology and monkeywrench it so that it serves purposes that benefit me rather than whatever huge and insanely corrupt corporation happens to be pushing it at me.

I’ve used technology as an example here. Keep in mind, however, that détournement is no more limited to technology than it is to artworks or image macros. All through your life, you encounter situations of many kinds that are intended to benefit the corporate-bureaucratic system of modern industrial society at your expense. Sometimes, for one reason or another, it’s necessary to accept those situations and use other counterspells to ward off the negative consequences. Sometimes it’s better simply to walk away, giving up whatever benefits are being dangled in front of you so that you can avoid the downsides. In some cases, however, it’s possible to détourn the situation within the inescapable limits it imposes, and exploit it to your own advantage.

All three of these options, to be used intelligently, require certain habits of consciousness that the inmates of modern industrial societies are systematically taught not to develop, or even to dream of. As we explore some of the other strategic possibilities opened up by Situationism, those habits will become clearer, and their relationship to certain traditions of thought and practice in past and present will become hard to miss. We’ll pick up this topic in a future post.