Appropriation Art: Détournement

David Evans’ anthology of critical work by artists and commentators on appropriation art is the final component of our CATTt. Evans is crucial to our project because his book tells us how to write with images using the inference principles of conduction and the instructions from Virno’s political philosophy of language and Dean’s joke mechanism. Deleuze and Guattari help us identify a conceptual space on the plane of immanence (the image of thought), and they tell us that we need to find a way to “turn” on the plane away from the dominant commodity form in order to bring philosophy/thought back into its role of establishing well-being. Marchand, as the contrast component of the CATTt, shows us the powerful influence of the persuasive tools we will be using in this project (images, words, sound, repetition, habit), in a different way, to experience an image of thought in electracy.

Détournement:

A term coined by Guy Debord and the Situationist International (SI) movement of the 1960's, Detournement is usually translated into English as ‘diversion’ and was the method of artistic creation used by the situationists. (Urban Dictionary, 1999-2010)

Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1650).

Francis Bacon, Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953).

Minor Détournement
“Minor détournement is the détournement of an element which has no importance in itself and which thus draws all its meaning from its new context in which it has been placed. For example, a press clipping, a neutral phrase, a commonplace photograph” (35).

Deceptive Détournement
“Deceptive détournement, which is 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” (35).

Four Laws of Détourned Elements

1. “It is the most distant détourned 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” (35).
2. “The distortions introduced in the détourned elements must be as simplified as possible, since the main force of a détournement 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 détournement, this is only a particular case of a general law that governs not only a détournement but also any other form of action on the world. The idea of a pure, absolute expression is dead; it only temporarily survives in parodic form as long as our other enemies survive” (35).
3. "Détournement 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” (35).
4. "Détournement by simple reversal is always more direct and the least effective. Thus, the Black Mass reacts against the construction of an ambiance based on given metaphysics by constructing an ambiance in the same framework that merely reverses – and thus simultaneously conserves – the values of the metaphysics. Such reversals may nevertheless have a certain progressive aspect” (36).

Debord and Wolman reveal the depth of associations that any one appropriated element can add to or take away from a finished piece’s meaning. One détourned element, for example, can be associated with past, present, or future meanings (in its new or old context), and these various meanings can intermingle among other (unassociated) elements, or the entire appropriated piece, in interesting (ultimately unpredictable) ways. The elements that are placed together in appropriation art are, of course, borrowed from their original semantic contexts. This borrowing literally creates the free play of signification that is characteristic of dream-work and the related inference principle of conduction, but it is the placement of these lifted elements, among other similar and dissimilar elements, and their fixation in relative time, in one image, that guarantees a perpetual freedom from the semantic constraints of the signified. Meaning, therefore, becomes relational, open, unfixed. The innovation of electracy is that this space of meaning is not chaos; it is opportunity. Appropriation art speaks the language of this logic (conduction).

When the Greeks invented alphabetic writing, they noticed patterns in the written documentation of their oral culture that would have been impossible to recognize otherwise. The definition of “literacy is working out the power of that recording mechanism” (Lecture Notes). Technology, it is impossible not to recognize, is decentering or has decentered writing, speech, and experience, just as writing decentered the Greeks’ traditional conception of meaning in oral culture. The reading device in electracy is the image. When the direct experience of reality is replicated in photograph, film, or audio footage, the replicated “image” of the former reality becomes the recording mechanism, in electracy, for writing, speech, or experience. Appropriation art communicates using the concept of writing with the world (Lecture Notes). The image of the world, its experienced collective and singular actions, its appearance, what it means and doesn’t mean to us, what we do in it, what we did, what we will do, what we think and don’t think, how we think and don’t think, is the language for writing in electracy. “Pop culture is to electracy what literacy was to the Greeks” (Lecture Notes).

Like letters that make up words with specific meanings which are then combined using grammatical rules to create strings of meaning, appropriation art creates a conversation out of images. This conversation may be drawn from commodity culture, but it contains the meaning elements (using the inference principles of conduction) that will initiate the turn in the space occupied by the concept routine on the plane of immanence, which we are regarding as collective thought. The term “routine” exemplifies the personal and collective norms which need to be disrupted (habitus, pop culture), the spectacle which is its vehicle (advertising, the commodity form, pop culture), the conscious spectacle of overturning it (Dean’s 1st Story, 2nd Story, Virno’s joke-logic, and stand-up routine), and the repetitive dependency on the clichés it embodies (Virno: the precondition for innovation is the system of rules and habits that determine the need for innovation).

The problem for the novice, in this new way of thinking/writing, is the need to think with all the meanings of a word or image (chôra). Working in the realm of free signification is a slippery process. I have started to work on the logical framework for creating an image of thought around my public policy issue using images, but it's very easy to get confused with how one appropriated element’s metaphors work with an aspect of another element’s, and whether that dialogue works (or doesn't work) with the all the other possible meanings of a second appropriated element, which, in turn, brings with it the semantic pressures of its previous time and space, its new time and space, and all the nuances of meanings it may or may not absorb from other nearby or far away appropriated elements. The complexities are profound and theoretically endless. It’s shocking to find such potential complexity in the images, words, and sounds that saturate a person’s average experience of popular culture. Debord and Wolman write that “[i]deas and realizations in the realm of détournement can be multiplied at will” (36)--the question of whose or what will is an important one:

Not only does détournement lead to the discovery of new aspects of talent but also, clashing head-on with all social and legal conventions, it is bound to appear as a powerful cultural tool 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 towards a literary communism. (36)

Debord and Wolman state that the “ultimate goal of [creating situations in appropriation art] . . . [is to make them] open to everyone to detour entire situations by deliberately changing this or that determinant condition of them” (39). The determinant condition in Dean’s joke machine is the “connector” as a pivot (based on assumption) that changes the expected meaning between the 1st and 2nd story. As our class begins to work on creating an appropriated image using common images from popular culture related to our public policy issues, Deans’ and Evans’ instructions will form the structural basis of our task.