ARTIFICIAL HELLS

artificial hells
prompting a media scandal. 33 Spies for Peace also overloaded forty telephone
lines belonging to British security centres through the continuous
dialling of numbers that had been discovered during the raid. Debord
enthusiastically describes these examples, and follows them with a discussion
of ‘cultural activity that one could call Situationist’, implying that he
did not view the examples given above in those terms. For Debord, a critical
cultural practice would not create new forms, but rather use ‘the existing
means of cultural expression’ through the Situationist technique of
détournement, the subversive appropriation of existing images to undermine
their existing meaning.
Michèle Bernstein exemplified this strategy of détournement when she
assembled a book out of two pre- existing popular fictions, Tous les chevaux
du roi (1960) and La Nuit (1961), to form a parody of Laclos’s Les Liaisons
dangereuses. Like other forms of Situationist détournement, Bernstein’s text
combines contemporary pop cultural clichés and the SI’s language of capitalist
critique (‘“What is it that you really do? I don’t understand”, says
Carole . . . “Reification”, says Gilles.’). 34 Détournement was regarded as the
more successful the less it approached a rational reply. A series of erotic
postcards, for example, were détourned by the addition of handwritten
captions, so that nude pin- ups addressed the viewer in speech bubbles:
‘The emancipation of the workers will be their own work!’, or ‘There’s
nothing better than sleeping with an Asturian miner. Now there you have
real men!’ 35 For the SI, a good détournement reversed the ideological function
of the effluvia of spectacle culture, but without adopting the form of a
simple inversion of the original, since this would keep the latter’s identity
securely in its place (Debord gives the example of a black mass: it inverts
the Catholic service but sustains its metaphysical structure). This theory of
détournement clearly builds upon Dada photomontage and Surrealist
assemblage that sought to unravel meaning, be this through gender subversion
(Duchamp’s moustachioed Mona Lisa, L.H.O.O.Q., 1919) or biting
political critique (John Heartfield’s numerous anti- Hitler photomontages
of the early 1930s). A good détournement seems to harness both types of
strategy, combining subversive irrationality and caustic political topicality.
Debord was adamant that critique of any kind should not take the form
of rational argument: he was hostile to structuralist interpretations of
culture, and to all critical languages that assert their mastery over preceding
methodologies. At the same time, Debord’s own writing frequently fell
into this trap: The Society of the Spectacle (1967) alternates brilliant and
incisive aphorisms with turgid, embittered orthodoxies. The SI’s other
alternatives to visual art, the dérive and the constructed situation, also
avoided rational critique and emphasised the importance of playfulness and
games. Because these experiential activities are rarely documented, they
are difficult to analyse, but numerous maps and sketches produced by the
group provide an important visual analogue. Debord’s Psychogeographical
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