The Digital Legacies of the Avant-Garde
Negativland: Detournement as Class Struggle
Sonic Outlaws, an experimental documentary film made in 1995 by Craig Baldwin, focuses on the sound-collage band Negativland’s utilization of recycled and remixed media as a setting for a larger discourse about creative ownership, copyright, and their impact on popular culture. The controversy surrounding the band’s usage of the name U2 for their album, and the subsequent frenzy following this event reveals basic truths about the changing nature of the culture industry. The film showcases a highly compressed repertoire of still and moving images, stretching from dada collages to 1950s sci-fi films and commercials, creative defacements of San Franscisco billboards, and original footage of Negativland as well as other notorious culture jamming groups of the 1980s and 1990s such as the Barbie Liberation Organization and the Tape Beatles. The soundtrack also mirrors this saturation, emphasizing that the film does not function only as a documentary about culture jamming but is itself constructed as a series of detournements of both popular culture and counterculture.
Album cover for Negativland's U2
This format allows viewers to critically analyze how detournement, or the reverse appropriation of media, works as a function of the times, as well as how its subsequent criticism reflects a continuing class struggle between the copyright owners and the artists and the musicians who claim the right for themselves of reusing copyrighted material for creative purposes. As is known, this new dialectic has and continues to affect the quality and distribution of media to this day.
Contrary to media analyses whuch tend to emphasize the power of modern media to monopolize the public imagination in order to manipulate a fundamentally passive audience, Sonic Outlaws shows how audiences have always been active and culture always participatory. For instance, the film shows how since the introduction of picture postcards in the late nineteenth century common people began to re-use and manipulate existing media in order to affect the popular imagination. While dadaists such as John Heartfield and George Grosz elevated collage to a form of art, manipulation and detournement exists ubiquitously in many forms and have become pervasive in contemporary culture. This is particularly true of digital media, which by incorporating functions such as cut and paste have automated detournement and collage to such an extent as to make them almost invisible.
In "A User’s Guide to Detournement," Situationists Guy Debord and Gil Wolman divide deteournement into two main categories, minor detournement and deceptive detournement. Debord and Wolman state that “Minor detournement is the detournement of an element which has no importance in itself and which thus draws all its meaning from the new context in which it has been placed...Deceptive detournement, is in contrast the detournement of an intrinsically significant element, which derives a different scope from the new context.” In the context of Sonic Outlaws, the film itself utilizes both the obvious and subversive methods. Negativland’s appropriation of the name U2 for the front cover of their EP, which cuts up and remixes U2's hit "I haven't still haven't found what I am looking for" with American Top 40 host Kasey Casem's rant against the band, is an example of both. On the one hand, the association of the name "U2" with the picture of a spy plane serves the rather mundane production purpose of projecting a certain image of speed and technological efficiency. But the appropriation of the symbolic (and commercial) power of the Irish band exemplifies the transition from minor to deceptive detournement, as it is only by listening to the album that the listener can fully grasp the parodic intention of the remix.
An Image of the band Negativland, appropraiting the name of th band U2's lead singer in another example of detourned information.
In this respect, Debord and Wolman are certainly right in stating that “detournement is less effective the more it approaches a rational reply,” as a logical and transparent reversal of a message does not necessarily achieve the desired effect. In the film, there are a multitude of examples of this. First, the use of repetition, allitteration, and seemingly nonsensical statements such “The letter U and the numeral 2, the letter U and the numeral 2, the numeral U and the letter 2,” dubbed over mixed footage of recording studios, fighter jets, and live concerts, is an example of how the hypnotic, subliminal character of such juxtapositions falls far away from simple reversal. Another example would be the Barbie Liberation Organization's inversion of the voice boxes of talking Barbies and GI Joes. In this case, the manipulation of a highly commercial product meant to stimulate children’s imagination and creativity, becomes a commentary on how the culture industy prefabricates stereotypes of masculinity and feminity, which are associated with warring and frivolous consumerism, respectively.
Finally, each method of detournement reveals the delicate push and pull of class struggle. In traditional Marxist terms, class struggle is defined as the battle between those who own the means of production (the bourgeoisie) and those who only own their labor-power (the proletariat). In the case of information, those in control (record labels and broadcasting networks), are preventing the actual producers (musicians, creatives, independent artists) from freely accessing the fruits of their labor. Detrournement is thus a weapon in the hands of latter to open up copyrighted materials to many possible uses. It functions as a subversive tactic in response to the tight grasp of media corporations' ownership of information. This is particularly true when the detournement is extended from a specific message or product to the medium itself. The movies shows a man who builds an illegal wire tapping device out of renegade radio parts, and fishes through the radio frequencies. The process can be done by almost anyone with knowledge of how radio waves work, and the results can be insanely voyeuristic. The man taps into a cell phone conversation between two men and here invasion of privacy is an understatement. But if any citizen can eavesdrop the private conversations of others, the government has been doing the same for years. Who owns the airwaves? In this respect, pirating the airwaves for creative purposes can be seen as a form of detournement of government control. By using the same methods to subvert without advancing a symmetrical replica of government surveillance, true detournement is realized.
From the format of the film itself to the loose and layered narrative structure, in Sonic Outlaws the medium mirrors the message. As a story about culture jamming, piracy and detournement takes the form of a striking visual collage, it reveals how pervasive remix culture has become in our own mental trajectories. Yet as contemporary digital culture continues to expand, detournement has become increasingly normalized and thus less and less political. The proliferation of images, information, and text through the Internet has made the usage and reusage of copyrighted material as commonplace as the original information itself. As much as detournement in its pure form is an example of taking back control of everyone's content, the size and scope of the Internet has made it impossible for the state to investigate, prosecute, or convict all the unauthorized (re)uses. In this way, what began as a struggle between the oppressor and the oppressed has turned into a commonplace artistic process in itself, oftentimes humorous and benign, due to see many more innovations as technology itself expands.