Towards Détournement

In 1967, French political theorist Guy Debord published the book The Society of the Spectacle, which argued that the expansion of capitalism and mass media fostered a passive lifestyle. Everyday life experiences, he argued, were replaced with experiences and relationships mediated through images and commodities. Debord termed this phenomenon “the spectacle” and proposed détournement, which translates to “hijacking” or “rerouting” in English, as a strategy to divert the spectacle and the social structures it upheld. Détournement takes the forms through which capitalism and mass media reach people—products, newspapers, advertisements, art—and exposes them as tools for presenting and affirming the ideas, institutions, and narratives that benefit a ruling class. In Towards Détournement, fifteen artists interrogate the role of power in images; they ask how images can dismantle other images and the values they affirm.