How to Write Instructions on Détournement after Tunisia and Egypt
Just trying to conceive of an approach for a reinvigorated detournement puts you in a doublebind, so the prospect of devising a set of instructions is daunting to the point of being numbing. You’re afraid that all you’ve got to offer a reader is razzle dazzle, and what is worse is that you’re pretty sure it’s much too late for showmanship. The moment when mystifying explanations could forestall action may have already passed.
Consider this: The demonstrations and riots in Tunisia started over unemployment, food inflation, corruption, free speech issues, and so on, but what sparked the overturning of first Tunisia and then Egypt was the death of a fruit vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi.
Now, according to the official website of the Tunisian National Tourist Office in the UK and Ireland, Tunisia is perfect destination spot for fruit lovers. Fresh locally grown fruit is readily available at the markets where tourists will find college educated vendors like Mohamed Bouazizi desperate for a pound, euro, or dollar. Pomegranates ripen in October while November is the start of the date season in Tunisia, but Bouazizi was selling apples when he was beaten by a police officer. The apples were confiscated because Bouazizi couldn’t produce the proper set of papers, and this rash but small act of brutality is what undid the dictatorship there.
Bouazizi set himself on fire in front of police headquarters in protest of his treatment and captured the imagination and attention of the Tunisian people. When he died eighteen days later more than 5000 people participated in the funeral procession.
When his livelihood was taken from him Mr. Bouazizi did not turn to urban foraging, but changed the coordinates of the world through an act of self destruction. It’s not an approach you can recommend to readers. It’s not even something you, as a trained professional, want to try out for yourself.
Warning. Do not try this at home. Do not pass go. Objects in the screen may be closer than they appear.
Instructions:
1. According to the Situationist International, Greil Marcus, and Wikipedia: detournement is a technique wherein mass produced images are turned back upon themselves. Or to quote the now legendary group Negativland: “Sounds so big they’re never out of view. Boxtop. Boxtop. You can retouch the photograph on the cover of America.”
Despite how impractical it seems, keep thinking about the issue in terms of representation. While you may risk aestheticizing and even trivializing real issues (after all the problems you face don’t seem like problems of representation, they seem tangible. Unemployment, environmental collapse, corporate and government corruption, low wages, poor public health, and so on… these things are real) if you hope to detourn anything you’ll have hold on to the idea to words, brushstrokes, chisel wood, etc.. Go ahead and bend, spindle, and mutilate.
2. Consider the possibility that the philosopher Henri Lefebvre was right when he claimed that space itself is socially produced. It’s an utterly quixotic suggestion, and to take it seriously means treating the world like a stage set or television studio. You actually are on the Truman Show and your hometown is Mister Rogers neighborhood. Still, if you can bring yourself to make-believe, Lefebvre’s assertion that space is socially produced makes sense. In fact, Mister Rogers and his neighborhood is a good example because Mister Rogers himself was obsessed with workers and production. He took tours of various factories and brought back documentaries that he screened on Picture/Picture. Mister Rogers pointed out that things like crayons, garbage cans, and bass violins didn’t just come into being on their own, but rather people made these things. It was the same for nearly everything: Crayons, houses, twinkies, pretzels, puppets.
Once you understand how almost all of the objects in our lives are made by people, it gets easier to own up to the production of space. Consider how not only your television set, but also the spaces television sets occupy, were made by people. For there to be television sets people had to make room for them, just like your mom and dad had to make room for you before you came into the world, and just like their moms and dads had to make room for them, and so on back through the years.
Before there were televisions there was radio, and before radio there was the printing press. In fact, you can track the production of the space for television all the way back to ancient Rome. When Julius Caesar wanted to inform the citizens of his Republic about important social or political events what did he do? He ordered the production of posters which would be displayed on big white boards in cities and villages throughout the Empire. And, in a way, these were the first television screens.
As Kafka once said, “it’s enough that the arrow exactly fit the wound.”
3. Watch a Will Ferrell movie. No, not Talladega Nights, but the film Stranger than Fiction. In this movie Will Ferrell comes to know his life as a representation. The space in which his life is played out becomes unreal to him when he starts to hear the voice of the narrator telling his story. Reality crumbles.
While the plot here is similar to the Truman Show, the Matrix, and Existenz, the difference between Stranger than Fiction and the Matrix is two fold: The first is that the illusion being cast by the narrator is not a purposeful deception, in fact it may not be a deception at all, and the second difference is how Stranger than Fiction treats space.
This is a story about a man named Harold Crick and his wristwatch. Harold Crick was a man of infinite numbers, endless calculations, and remarkably few words. And his wristwatch said even less. Every weekday, for twelve years, Harold would brush each of his thirty-two teeth seventy-six times. Thirty-eight times back and forth, thirty-eight times up and down.
Harold Crick is perhaps an obsessive compulsive. He is described as a solitary man with no friends, no ambitions, and no fantasies. He is the very definition of the company man, and his one defining characteristic, his need to count and measure the space around, is just another symptom of the emptiness of his life.
In fact, that emptiness is quite literal. Harold Crick is trapped in Kantian or Euclidian space. This is the space of mathematicians and geometrists and, through the revelation of the method, it is the space Ferrel is forced to give up. In this way Crick is made to reenact what, according to Lefebvre, had already occurred on a societal level. We’ve been living without Euclidian/perspectivist space for a hundred years:
Around 1910 a certain space was shattered. It was the space of common sense, of knowledge (savoir), of social practice, of political power, a space enshrined in everyday discourse.-Lefebvre, The Production of Space, pg 25
Once Harold Crick has come to accept that he is indeed hearing a voice in his head, a voice that is describing what is happening as it happens, he seeks psychiatric help. The psychiatrist, as played by Linda Hunt, suggests that what he is experiencing is schizophrenia, but when Crick insists that he really is in a story she recommends that, if his problem is literary rather than psychiatric, he should consult an expert in literature.
Dustin Hoffman plays the part of the literature professor, and while he is skeptical about Harold and his story at first, Hoffman’s professor is ultimately convinced when Crick recites a line the voice has spoken.
“Little did he know that this simple seemingly innocuous act would result in his imminent death.”
“‘Little did he know.’ Did you just say, ‘little did he know?’” Dustin Hoffman is elated. He says he’s taught seminars about “little did he know.” He’s dedicated whole courses to “Little Did He Know.” But why?
Since Descartes the problem of epistemology, or the problem of how we know that we know things, has been getting more and more accute. Over the course of the last few hundred years the knowing subject has been split off from the object of his knowledge. “Little did he know” as a theme in literature is an articulation of the split.
The philosopher Immanuel Kant, in an attempt to solve the mind/body or subject/object split, asserted that “space (and time) are not objective, self-subsisting realities, but subjective requirements of our human sensory-cognitive faculties to which all things must conform.” That is the structure of space is subjective but real, it is inherent in the mind, and this structure cuts us off from the real world. On the other hand the idea that space itself might be socially produced is another way to solve the problem. If the story is being told, if the structure of space is not innate by contingent, then while Ferrel is not the source of his own story at present he has a chance.
4. Turn away from the movie, after all the problem of how to bring off a social revolution isn’t a fictional problem or a problem of ideas, it is a problem in your actual life. Or as Harold Crick said in Stranger than Fiction:
“What you don’t seem to realize is that this isn’t a philosophy or a theory or a story for me. This is my life.”
The professor answered: “Of course, now just go out and make it the life you always wanted.”
5. Answer this question: Who is the narrator? Is it you? It could be, but in societies where industrial methods of production prevail you aren’t a single individual, but a class. This class of narrators is currently invisible, unconscious, but is working to become aware of itself. And this process of becoming aware of itself as the productive class that creates space, this is what is called revolution.
The Limbo of a Firing
In Kafka’s novel The Trial the bureaucracy appears as a decrepit ruin; falling apart, dusty, stale, the bowels of the system are full of holes, and yet the system itself is somehow stronger for it. The weakness of the structure is perversely its strength.
In Orson Welles film version of Kafka’s novel, Anthony Perkins is called to attend a preliminary hearing for his trial while he is at the theater. There is no official telegram, no formal sounding officer who reaches him by phone, but rather an innocuous note is passed to Perkins by a fellow theatergoer. The woman who passes him the note knows nothing about the business she’s participating in, and it is in this way, as an aside in an otherwise normal and untroubled daily discourse, that authority, in both the novel and the film, is made objective. Power floats weightlessly and is always out of the line of sight.
When my supervisor at Comcast informed me that I might be fired from my cubicle job at the Beaverton call center he did not make a big production out of getting my attention, but simply tapped me on the shoulder while I was at work selling what we called CHSI (Comcast’s High Speed Internet). When I turned to see who was tapping I found him, this 20 something who always appeared to me to have walked off the set of an HBO original series, talking to another salesman over the cubicle wall. He was smiling and laughing, apparently having been distracted from his task in the time it took me to turn around.
“Got a second?” he asked.
This is how I discovered that I was under the threat of possible termination. In fact, he didn’t tell me I was fired right away, but rather I was pulled aside, taken off the phones, and escorted to the dimly lit and windowless back room office of the human resource manager. If my immediate supervisor looked like Vincent Chase from Entourage, the human resources manager looked something more like Mr. Clean: bald, corporate and perhaps just a touch queer.
“Can you tell us why you didn’t offer this customer phone service?” he wanted to know.
And I started to relax. If they were going to fire me for this infraction I could at least be secure in the knowledge that the punishment didn’t fit the crime. The rule and its implementation were absurd, but too blatantly so. If Kafka had been writing the scene he’d have aimed to spread the absurdity around. The point is always to involve the accused in the passing of judgement. For example, in the Trial the police do not charge the protagonist with anything, but just treat him as guilty and in this way inspire the accused to magnify his sense of guilt. By telling me directly what it was that I’d done Mr. Clean and my hipster supervisor had let me off the hook.
Also I was wise. That is, sometimes a theory can be a useful thing. When you are working in a suburban call center for a major telecommunications corporation and find that you are subject to absurd rules, rules that are not only cumbersome and inhibiting but that even contradict one another so that in order to function at all one must break them, when pecariousness is the inevitable result of the way a job is structured, it helps to know why management is always pushed to push the workers in just this way. It’s helpful to seek some sort of big picture when faced with personal woes.
As the youtube star Brendan Mcooney wrote in his description for his youtube video, Law of Value 6: Socially Necessary Labor Time:
“Our private labor doesn’t immediately become social. It must become value in order to be social. But in becoming value it is disciplined by socially necessary labor time. SNLT acts as an external force which disciplines our private labor, constantly compelling us to work more efficiently, yet never actually making our work easier or more fulfilling.”
It’s probably worth noting that before Mcooney a writer named Marx made a similar point, and while it’s easy enough to get lost in the history of debate around Marx’s labor theory of value and various definitions of Socially Necessary Labor Time, this much is fairly certain. After the economic downturn of 2008 many, many more customer were calling in to downgrade or shut off their cable services. In order to make up this loss in revenue the sales department was being disciplined in the hopes that such discipline would make us more efficient. Before the downturn we could be confident that as long as we were making sales we would be secure in our jobs, but now we were being asked to be more efficient on every call. We had to push the product harder.
This was why my job was in jeopardy, and the fact that I had sold 2 of the three products possible during the call in question, the further fact that the customer had required an instant installation which made the selling of the third product impossibile, none of these facts mattered. What mattered was discipline on the floor, and if that put some employees in a double bind (one could just as easily be fired for failing to meet quota while adhering to the new efficiency protocol as for failing to adhere), well that didn’t matter either. Given the high unemployment rate in our community churn and downsizing was another efficiency. 
I understood all of this. They could fire me, but they couldn’t touch me, or so I thought.
Their final trick was not firing me outright. They had to think it over, and in the meantime they’d keep me on the phones. They’d let me dangle, let me take in the full implications of the word ‘misconduct’, and then (when the newly hired sales team was ready to hit the floor) they’d fire me.
Going back to my desk the question that whirled around inside my head wasn’t whether or not the rule itself was just, but whether the rule was a cover story. Given the absurdity of it I had to wonder if it might have been enforced for the reasons other than those that were given, and perhaps these other, more reasonable, charges were more substantial.
My guilt found me as I walked back to my desk and once it came I looked for a reason for it. The feeling had to attach to something. What was it that I’d done to give power an excuse to excercise its arbitrary will?
As I took the next sales call (the young woman on the other end of the line wanted to know if she could get internet for 19.99 and I had to tell her that she couldn’t and sell it to her for thirty dollars instead) two competing questions spun around in my head. The first was this: What was wrong with me that I’d been fired from such a low level job? And the second question was: Why do we all put up with it? How did the spectacle of Comcast reproduce itself daily, and what was the connection between the content the company provided (Mtv, HBO or the Playboy channel, etc…) and the compensatory activities and beliefs that ensured that we stayed in our cubicles? 
It turned out that the answers to these two questions were identical with each other.
The corporation imposes a cynical hedonism. The heroes of hipster Hollywood, the critical distance implied in every line of dialog in programs such as Californication or Entourage, both undermine and support the corporate culture. And the logic that reproduces daily life at Comcast is the logic of a strange loop or a knot.
For example, one must always be out for one’s self on the job and one must be willing to cheat and to lie in order to get ahead on the job. This is what we were secretly taught in our training class, and it is what we were more overtly taught during the daily practice of selling cable. However, one must never be caught cheating and lying to the customer. In order to get ahead in the system one must finally stop recognizing cheating and lying as cheating and lying and view it instead as using the right language. If one internalizes the lying deeply enough then one can never be caught.
Or as the anti-psychiatrist RD Laing put it in his 1969 poetry book/psychiatric rant Knots:
They are playing a game. They are playing at not
Playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I
Shall break the rules and they will punish me
I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game
And here’s another approach to saying the same thing: If a cubicle had four walls instead of three the worker would realize that he was trapped, but with just three walls the worker is free to stay in his cubicle.
