(7:30)

     Guy Debord writes:  “The powers of film are so extensive, and the absence of coordination of those powers is so glaring, that virtually any film that is above the miserable average can provide matter for endless polemics among spectators or professional critics.  Only the conformism of those people prevents them from discovering equally appealing charms and equally glaring faults even in the worst films... 

     “It would be better to detourn it as a whole, without necessarily even altering the montage, by adding a soundtrack that made a powerful denunciation of the horrors of imperialist war...most films only merit being cut up to compose other works... 

     “In closing, we should briefly mention some aspects of what we call ultradétournement, that is, the tendencies for détournement to operate in everyday social life.  Gestures and words can be given other meanings, and have been throughout history for various practical reasons... 

     “The need for a secret language, for passwords, is inseparable from a tendency toward play.  Ultimately, any sign or word is susceptible to being converted into something else, even into its opposite... 

     “Finally, when we have got to the stage of constructing situations — the ultimate goal of all our activity — everyone will be free to detourn entire situations by deliberately changing this or that determinant condition of them...

     “The methods that we have briefly dealt with here are presented not as our own invention, but as a generally widespread practice which we propose to systematize...

     “In itself, the theory of détournement scarcely interests us.  But we find it linked to almost all the constructive aspects of the pre-situationist period of transition.  Thus its enrichment, through practice, seems necessary.”

                 from:  Guy Debord,  A User’s Guide to Detournement  1956

     Guy Debord was loosely regarded as the theoretical leader of Situationist International.  Like the Surrealists and Dadaists before it, SI was comprised primarily of male artists.  They were weirdly exclusive, elitist, egoist, educated.  They considered themselves avant-garde.  Their ‘situations’ were intentional expressions for turning the capitalist system against itself -- employing pranks, punks and jammings -- which counter-attacked capitalism’s degradation of all people within its sphere. 

     The Situationists believed that as our technologies inexorably advanced, the ‘ends of work’ fail, increasingly blocking happiness and freedom.  In its place, mass-production becomes ‘spectacle’, the concrete manufacture of alienation.  But as one might expect, their antics barely caught the public’s interest.

     While the potentials in conflating media practice with political theory and revolutionary perspective deeply appeal to me and my PeepTV.ca projects, my general purpose is markedly more modest than those espoused by the Situationists.  For I do not wish to change the world.  I have my hands full trying to wrap my head around the absurdist commonalities in the everyday media I observe.  Instead, I am now trying to change my world.  Because, “maybe with the next generation it will be different.”

    So, when I heard former Senator Trent Lott (R:MS) just this week on TV blame “the airplane” for the communicational gridlock on capital hill, I took notice and went to work.  For his claim is as absurdist as any created by the Situationists.  It is a claim which should be resharpened for stabbing back.  And to help flint-knap my counter-attack, I used ambient audio, random-extant early-1960’s footage, and The Lawrence Welk Show.  I cut them all into parts and refunctioned the bits along with Lott’s voice...to sublate and transcend.  It is a positive barbarism of “new bad things” against “good old things”.

     Of course, in a curious twist, Trent Lott’s airplanes can indeed be theorized as mass communication (Innis), but to wistfully moon about some “next generation” fix is both cruel and ludicrous.  Lott’s generation danced itself blissfully through the very historical rapture of mass-communicational evolution.  So is today’s generation, and so will the next one.  Better, maybe, to stick to my knitting here and refunction my screen for my own private (r)evolution in quiet dedication to so many early Situationist International films (1973). 

   "In a world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false."

     This video is simply another in my own ‘next-generation’ advancement.  To both Benjamin and Adorno, it would be considered Aufhebung, in all three senses of the word -- preserving, negation, going beyond.  Brecht and Baudrillard would most likely find this ultradétournement video much too ‘hypnotic’.  While Eisenstein, on the other hand, would undoubtedly re-sketch something more formalist still, while washing down his bloody steak and meat soup with two cups of cocoa and two French rolls.