Debord's Methods of Detournement

Zuzana Muranicova
Response to Guy Debord’s Methods of Detournement
Reading-01


The main theme interwoven throughout the article was that art and poetry are a production by all people. I though this was interesting since we live in a society where individualism is encouraged and where power rests in a small group of individuals. It is empowering to think that the transformation of societal structure requires only a change in our perception of the world. Detournement, a strategy that Guy Debord helped invent, is similar to parody but it directly reuses a mimicry of the original work rather than creating a new work which merely alludes strongly to the original. It suggests appropriating the weapons of the enemy and turning them against it. I found it fitting to read that tendencies toward detournement can be observed in the advertising industry. The creators in advertising industries reuse elements of well known media to create new work with a different message, often opposed to the original. Overall I saw the article as an attack on authoritarian structures and bureaucracy, which seemed refreshing. The idea of detournemenet proposed a way to make art the dominant power and to discover new aspects of talent. I understood it as an exploration of labyrinths of language and as something with peculiar power which stems from the double meaning, from the enrichment of most of the terms by coexistence within them of their old and new senses. Detournemenet is widely applicable in things such as language, clothing, actions, situations, etc. , which are all susceptible to being converted into something else.