A term used by Guy Debord and the French politicized avant-garde group known as the Situationists to describe a creative appropriation that attempts to radically change the intended meaning or direction of the original work. For the Situationists, this means using outmoded media to express new, more progressive values. The Situationists were far left “art activists.”
Background: A highly politicized avant-garde art movement, inspired by Dada and early Soviet experimentalism, the Situationists popularized the sociological concept of “The Spectacle,” the pervasive representation of reality in images that started with mass production of culture, motion pictures, and broadcast media such as television. It is the represented “reality” in which we now all “live,” and at least when Debord was writing was controlled by those in positions of privilege and power. Humans have gradually moved from direct experience of and participation in culture and reality to becoming passive consumers and spectators of it, often treating real life as a form of media spectacle, of which we are the passive observers. Nothing is real, everything is entertainment, and we live much of our own lives through this passive consumption of other people’s images. Everything that was once directly lived is now often experienced through representations of life, images. Before industrialization, we were focused on unmediated being and direct embodied social relations. Gradually we became convinced that having could and should replace being (consumer culture). And now we think what matters is appearing (appearing to be, appearing to have, being part of The Spectacle). This is the triumph of mainstream consumer culture over our very consciousness and sense of who/what we are as human beings. As the rock music critic Greil Marcus put it: “We are twice removed from where we want to be, the situationists argued – yet each day still seems like a natural fact.”
The Situationists wanted to wrench us out of this mass hallucination, and believed that the products of the media could be turned back against the Spectacle, to criticize it, and interrupt our unthinking consumption of it.
The term détournement is French for “hijacking, diverting, changing the course of something.”
Détournement as an artistic practice means “hijacking” the media of those in power or the established culture and turning it to a new meaning, one that is antithetical to, or at least not completely in line with the original intentions.
It also involves hijacking media that reproduces tired reactionary attitudes or values to give them a new, more progressive meaning; or hijacking media that presents a point of view that is largely unquestioned by the general public to throw it into question and make people think and feel about it again.
In 1956 Debord and Gil J. Wolman wrote a short “User’s Guide” that includes ideas like these:
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.
…
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.
The idea is a forerunner of Negativland’s Culture Jamming.
See also culture jam, recuperation.