I feel as though Deerhoof's new album will be an appropriate soundtrack for this brief essay on Debord's essay Methods of Détournement as well as his film, La Société du spectacle. Why Deerhoof's new album Deerhoof vs. Evil?
Three reasons:
1. Satomi Matsuzaki's voice within such a band feels like an act of detournement in and of itself. There's a consciousness of parataxis. This feels -to me- not unlike Debord's juxtaposed footage of naked women and states men. Yes, at points the music and the vocals function on the same plane, as does any great act of detournemont but, as Debord points out, "Détournement is less effective the more it approaches a rational reply." This album, like this band, like La Société du spectacle is past meaning making in the traditional sense. We are involved in and conscious of the spectacle that we usually take for granted in the invisibly abrasively commodity driven spectacle of the daily.
2. The album is called Deerhoof vs. Evil. This has a similar feel to Debord's vision of the remix artist, taking abstractions of what was once the tangible earth, and reconstructing them. "The tangible world finds itself replaced by a selection of images which exist above it and which at the same time has placed itself recognized as the tangible par experience."
While both this essay and this film -as well as Debord's book- are filled with wonderful aphorisms. (Yes, I do think they are wonderful. Things can be bleak and wonderful at the same time. Just look at the spectacle. Just listen this Deerhoof album I'm discussing.) the prior is one of my favorite. The tangible world has become images, these images have become our tangible existence. The simulacrum encounters itself through the viewer, in the case of film.
Also, both seem to be fighting the abstract real. Evil is such a large, ominous unspecific term. For the sake of the album title I think it's facetiously ambitious but no less successful as a result.
It's akin to Debord's spectacle, everywhere and no where. It takes a conscious mind to demolish it while existing with in it. "The spectacle is not a collection of images but a social relation among persons mediated by images." The act of remix art or any art form in this way is to almost bubble out, or warp the tangible world. To be overly abrasive tears and to be unwittingly accepting does nothing but stupify.
Good art should be abrasive in a certain sense, to draw attention to it's action and intents, basically. I think Deerhoof and Debord would agree on that.
3. I like it and just bought this record today. It's the reason I'm writing this a little bit late. It was sunny. I like bikes and record shopping. I'm a dirty rotten hipster and forgot I needed to do this today. Sorry. "The spectacle is the flip side of money. It, too, is an abstract general equivalent of all commodities."
Moving on,
In "Methods of Détournement" Debord discusses some art forms that I have played around with and am interested in. Psychogeography relates directly to a Google Map project myself and several other collaborators worked on a few months ago. The goal of the project was to remix an essay by multimedia artist Mark Amerika. Other remixes of the essay involved an appropriation of Youtube videos, a sound piece mixing various websites, and a short play made almost entirely of plagiarized philosophies and artist statements.
It turns out I invented Guy-Deord. Who knew?
The thing that really fascinated me was Metagraphic writing. It was an absolutely new concept to me, initially. This has since faded. The fleeting nature of the profound moment, as Emerson might put it. Or, as Debord does, "a moment ... grown old and it may never again be rejuvenated."
It faded last night, as I was going to sleep. The English and German alphabet was, initially, an act of Metagraphic writing. Both alphabets use letters from French and Italian. This is why the symbols do not represent the sounds. English is not a phonetic language in this way. Where as French and Spanish are.
Another, older example of this is the Japanese language. Wanting to keep place with the Chinese art of poetry the Japanese used Chinese characters to construct the first Kanji. So, Debord's idea for Metagraphic writing, while not necessarily new, has proven to be revolutionary in the case of at least three languages.
So in the end, like most things, nothing is new. It's always been here. "Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it.
It's a matter of how we deconstruct and reconstruct it. There in lies the rejuvenation.
Hey, come to think of it, Satomi Matsuzaki -lead singer of Deerhoof- is Japanese. Is her voice, placed in an esoteric American rock context, an act of detournemont? A sort of MetaAudiodacticism?
Did I mention they had a new album?
No?
It's pretty great. I just got it. but I like it a lot already.
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