The Detournement, premise to the Remix from a political, aesthetic and technical perspective ?
Résumé
In the late 1950s the French revolutionary artists’ group the Situationist International (SI) formed to fight against, and destabilize, capitalist society by creating visual representations, objects and situations that would question the spectators, invite them to reconsider their own position towards society, and increase their international consciousness. Guy Debord and Constant Nieuwenhuys articulate the SI initiative, as “The situationists must take every opportunity to oppose retrograde forces and ideologies, in the culture and wherever the question of the meaning of life arises.”
An example of their actions and modalities is an attack made by the SI during the International Assembly Of Art Critics in Belgium. They disrupted the press conference by handing out a flyer signed “In the name of the Algerian, Belgian, French, German, Italian and Scandinavian sections of the SI, by Khatib, Korun, Debord, Platschek, Pinot-Gallizio and Jorn” . It was a tactic that had served them well as the Lettrist International when they disrupted a Charlie Chaplin press conference , or when one member, dressed as a priest, denounced God and the church from the pulpit of Notre Dame cathedral.
To reach international audiences, they supported acts of defiance such as the Los Angeles Watts race riots of 1965. They wrote and asked for support from artists and intellectuals in Europe to sign the Declaration on the Right to Insubordination in the Algerian War and published it in September 1960. Within their home nation of France, they made assaults on cyberneticians at Strasbourg University in 1966 and against sociologists at Nanterre University. These violent actions were a prelude to the events of May ’68, the first wildcat strike in history and the largest general strike to stop the economic functioning of an industrial capitalist society. In a speech about the aftermath in June 1968, Charles De Gaulle declared “this explosion was provoked by groups rebelling against modern consumer and technical society, whether it be the communism of the East or the capitalism of the West.”
The ramifications of this movement in different cultural contexts are interesting enough to warrant a specific study of its history, its goals and its various means of expression.
The transmission of these powerful political and aesthetic moments were part of my training initiated with Jean Rouch; and were rooted in the dynamic of détournement , a word that is near impossible to translate into English. Ken Knabb who translated into English most of the texts of the Situationist movement explained “The French word détournement means deflection, diversion, rerouting, distortion, misuse, misappropriation, hijacking, or otherwise turning something aside from its normal course or purpose.”
A look back on Rouch’s transmission process, regularly referring to these ideas could be a useful tool allowing us to fully understand the ways such ideas and values can be transmitted in an academic context. Jean Rouch, ethnologist, engineer and internationally famous filmmaker, questioned our relationship to the so called ‘real’, our ways of perceiving differences in cultural expression, and our means of understanding phenomena classified as invisible.
After a brief historical overview of the SI and their political agenda based on détournement, I will explore some of the work produced by Jean Rouch as a connecting factor between the SI and the Remix movement to recall some of the different forms taken by the remixer in the visual arts and in music production, and then examine how the détournement, in correlation with the programming language affected the remix and influenced it in regard to its different political, aesthetic and technical dimension.
Domaines
Anthropologie sociale et ethnologie
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