| Detournement |  |
Detournement is defined (in the inaugural issue of Situationist International) as "the integration of past or present artistic production into a superior construction of a milieu." Using techniques like collage and cut-and-paste, Situationists like Debord and Vaneigem collected images from popular media and rearranged them to thwart and corrupt their intended meanings. Wishing to "supersede" existing art, they used that art (or other medium, such as advertisements or magazine images) to critique and disrupt the art (or other medium) itself. What better way to reveal the weaknesses inherent in a project than by using its own language to defame it? We can see the legacy of this technique very clearly in some of the "culture jamming" efforts of today's anti-consumerist activists. Adbusters magazine, for example, is famous for its use of "anti-advertising," which takes the ubiquitously familiar imagery from an ad campaign (say, the Marlboro Man), and distorts the text or context so that the ad ends up "selling" something completely opposite to the intended product (for example, they put the Marlboro Man on a horse and portrayed him dying of lung cancer, to discourage consumers from buying cigarettes). The efficacy of detournement as a tool of persuasion is obvious in the fact that the technique has endured and evolved over decades and in the face of a mushrooming consumer culture.
