Guy Debord’s film La Société Du Spectacle suggests that creating representations limits our understanding of truths. The film implies that real objects, images, ideas and events are never accurately re-rendered, and upon any attempt to make a re-creation a new form is made, one that differs significantly from the original in intent.
Détournement is a method of remixing (often literature) from existing sources into a new understanding. By combining the suggestion made in Debord’s film, any remix by its nature differs significantly from the original. This does not seem particularly significant (since two have been made one) unless the consideration is made that any representation misrepresents the original, and that any combination of elements provokes a relationship no matter how unrelated the two separate ideas were to begin with.
The suggestion Debord makes is that significant meaning is made any time any unrelated elements are brought together. Suggesting this greatly diminishes the supposed significance of carefully selected groupings (ideas supported by ideas like the myth of genius and the death of the author), as any element in combination with any other provides meaning potentially as significant as carefully rendered ones. Without really trying then, any juxtaposition one makes is arguably as significant as any other juxtaposition that has ever been made. Michelangelo’s images of Adam and God from the Sistine Chapel ceiling are equally significant to a combined photographic representation of Pierre Manzoni’s “Artist’s Shit” with a first edition copy of Joseph Heller’s “Catch 22″.
I don’t know what else to describe about this other than I’m pretty happy about the Manzoni/Heller remix idea.
