On the Origins of Détournement: Guy Debord’s Affinity for the Methods of Isidore Ducasse

As more and more artists embraced time-based, technological reproducible media in the mid-1950s, future Situationist International leader Guy Debord (1932-1994) theorized détournement, an appropriation-based artistic practice applicable to recorded sound and the moving image. Since 2005 art historians have published extensively on détournement, but these accounts have so far failed to describe its complicated and deeply weird resonances with experimental writings by the Uruguayan-born, nineteenth-century poète maudit Isidore Ducasse (aka the Comte de Lautréamont, 1846-1870). To correct this oversight, my paper will illustrate Ducasse's seldom-discussed appropriative technique, describe its misapprehension by the Surrealist artists and French journalists who championed it for the wrong reasons, and explain détournement’s particular indebtedness to Ducasse’s Poesies, 1870, a book of faux literary criticism constructed with verbiage pilfered from seventeenth and eighteenth century French literature. Beyond detailing Debord's admiration for Poesies and several audiovisual artworks he produced or proposed in light of Ducasse’s method, my paper considers détournement’s broader aesthetic ramifications in light of the phonographic and cinematic technologies that enacted a bifurcation of visual and auditory perception from approximately 1900 to 2000. It compares détournement to pre-1945 Cubist and Dadaist appropriation art, paying particular attention to what Sabina Kribel has identified as John Heartfield's "suture" technique. The paper’s conclusion assesses détournement’s value to contemporary artists who work with appropriated sounds and the moving images on computational platforms.