4 Laws of Detournement

For my second "Band" presentation, my group had to put together a set of instructions on how to use appropriation in our project of creating the Unthought (both for our public policy topic and for thinking philosophy through the medium of the internet). Much of what we based our instructions on (in fact, probably all of it) was taken from Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman's Directions for the Use of Detournement - 1956. Listed below are their laws. Special thanks to Michele Nordie who helped with the presentation.

1. The most distant detournement elements contribute most sharply to the overall impression, and not the elements that directly determine the nature of this impression.

2. Distortions in the detourned elements must be as simplified as possible, since the main force of a detournement is directly related to the conscious or vague recollection of the original contexts of the elements.

3. Detournement is less effective the more it approaches a rational reply.

4. Detournement by simple reversal is always the most direct and least effective

While we only had to read an excerpt from the complete article, I found a website with the whole text available to read here. Also, if you'd like, you can learn a bit about detournement from the comic strip Blondie - an interesting example of appropriation.