Reusing Culture: The Import of Detournement

A notable aspect of contemporary culture, one could even say the most notable one, is the enhancement in the pace and scope of cultural production and diffusion that the use of readily available cultural material makes possible. If cultural phenomena are emergent, then it can be said that by the middle of the twentieth century, conditions were ripe for cultural emergence of a higher order, made possible by a massive and easy reuse of available cultural material. A comprehensive examination of this issue can ill afford to overlook the contributions made several decades ago by the Lettrists and the Situationists. One of the central themes in the work of the Lettrists and the Situationists was their advocacy of détournement, which can be characterized in a preliminary way as the use and recombination of available cultural items such as phrases, parts of books, images, film footage and soundtracks.

Lettrism was a post-World War II art movement founded in Paris by Isidore Isou. Some of its younger members, including Guy Debord and Gil Wolman, split off from it in 1952 to form the Lettrist International. Debord (but not Wolman) went on to found the Situationist International in 1957. That group disbanded in 1972. Despite these groups’ impressive sounding titles, they were very small associations of individuals loosely modeled on the example set by André Breton and the Surrealists. The view I present of these Lettrists, who styled themselves as radical Lettrists before adopting the label of Situationists, is colored by the fact that special attention needs to be given to texts and available documents stemming from the earlier stage of their activity. ¹ This leads me to draw an outline of their views that is somewhat different from those (still relatively few) available in the literature. ²

I will argue that the Lettrists (who were soon to turn into Situationists) constructed in the 1950s a distinctive approach to understanding cultural processes of production and diffusion. From the documents of that decade, mostly initially self-published, we see the development of a picture of cultural processes as iterated modes of group self-organization. Indeed, the import of the Lettrists-turned-Situationists for us today is that they recognized and promoted a positive, network-based conception of culture that diverged from representational models long before it was fashionable to speak of networks. Moreover, they attempted to implement such a conception directly in their own locally-formed groups. According to their positive conception of culture, significance is generated in and through the very interactions among individuals acting in small groups. Visual, verbal, auditory, and other inscriptions are tools or markers that serve to provoke and achieve this interaction. The sense of “significance” privileged by the Situationists amounts to visual, verbal, and auditory material serving as reusable elements in small group interaction; the meaningful content of the material used is the collection of distributed interactions it can be employed to produce. Any other kind of significance is “spectacular.”

Thus significance is generated, according to the Lettrists-Situationists, by collective action as such. Collective action generates significance by turning upon itself, taking outcomes of past interactions and setting them up for ongoing uptake by others in a process of bootstrapping that creates new patterns of organization. It is this bootstrapping process that the Lettrists-Situationists called détournement. Hence, détournement lies at the core of their positive conception of significance as iterated group uptake. A critical mass of cultural items and opportunities for their reuse is required for there to be significance in this positive or non-spectacular sense. Prior to reaching such a critical point, significance tends to be construed as representation: that is, as a piecemeal correspondence of cultural objects to some mental or physical reality. This “correspondence” view of representation was regarded by the Situationists as spectacular; within contemporary culture, they claimed, the spectacle was enforced by restricting or freezing up the possibilities for free intra-group uptake of cultural elements.

Because of the central importance of détournement to the understanding of culture and of significance as arising from group self-organization, this paper will focus on...