The Don of Détournement

Spectacle Undermines Liberal Hypocrisy Shock

Détourned Painting, Asger Jorn The Disquieting Duckling 1959, Museum Jorn, Silkeborg, Denmark. Vandalised by ‘AI artist’ Ibi Pippi in 2022

‘The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images. The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual excess produced by mass-media technologies. It is a worldview that has actually been materialized, that has become an objective reality.’ Guy Debord

When he called into Fox & Friends” on Saturday morning, Trump said of his assault on Venezuela that he ‘watched it like a television show…If you would have seen the speed, the violence . . . it was an amazing thing…overwhelming American military power — air, land and sea — was used to launch a spectacular assault. And it was an assault like people have never seen since World War II.’

Forget the D-Day Landings (the ghost of Antifa); this is the Society of the Spectacle after all.

T.J. Clark, commenting on the latest turns of the Spectacle (London Review of Books, 2 Dec, 2025) , writes that Trump is ‘genius of détournement’. The word denotes a dark art rooted in the history of art. Asger Jorn wrote in a 1959 essay entitled Détourned Painting

‘Collectors and museums be modern. If you have old paintings, do not despair. Retain your memories but détourn them so that they correspond with your era. Why reject the old if one can modernize it with a few strokes of the brush? ... Painting is over. You might as well finish it off. Détourn. Long live painting.’

In the art world of the late 1950s Jorn and the Situationists saw Abstract Expressionism as institutional recuperation of the ‘avante-guard’ in the service of American cultural imperialism. To combat this the Situationists developed strategy of ‘détournement’. As Karen Kurczynski puts it,

‘détournement and recuperation can only be understood in direct relation to each other, since they operate as a sort of hinge between authority and subversion. They reveal power as a dialectic, never static but incessantly re-established through struggle.’ (Expression as vandalism: Asger Jorn’s ‘Modifications’, Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 53/54, 2008)

Détournement was developed by the Situationists into a more general concept of spontaneous rebellion against the technology of consumption. In 1962, Internationale Situationiste hailed young ‘vandals’ who represented a form of resistance against ‘machines of consumption’ as much as the Luddites’ ‘primitive’ resistance against mechanized production in the early-nineteenth century:

‘It is evident that now, as then, the value does not lie in the destruction itself, but in the insubordination which can eventually transform itself into a positive project, to the point of reconverting the machines in a way that increases people’s real power.’

Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle was published in France in 1967, making him the articulator, if not the prophet of the May 1968 near-revolution. Sixty years later, the example of the Luddites is discussed in relation to AI. ‘Insubordination’ persists but at present lacks a ‘positive project’.

T.J. Clark, member of the English Section of the Situationist International in the mid-1960s, now a renowned art historian, no longer has faith in proletarian revolution, but insists “Capitalism remains my Satan.”

‘We’re all tired of apocalypse-speak. Nonetheless, the spectacle still has a few surprises up its sleeve… Trump, the genius of détournement, delights in saying out loud what the “lunatic left” is accused (by Trump’s friends) of whispering behind its hands. You can feel him daring his real enemy – the media mainstream – to repeat the charges.’

Clark quotes Trump’s speech to the Knesset 13 October 2025, which wasn’t widely reported. Clark can see why.

‘And we’ve given a lot to Israel, frankly. Bibi would call me so many times, “Can you get me this weapon, that weapon, that weapon?” Some of ’em I never heard of, Bibi, and I made ’em! [Laughter] But we’d get ’em here, wouldn’t we, huh? And they’re the best. They are the best. And you used them well. It also takes people that know how to use them, and you obviously used them very well. What a job! What a job you’ve done ... Those are just a few of the reasons why I am proud to be the best friend that Israel has ever had.’

Trump had a lot fun outing the 'AIPAC purchasers of the US political class. “Isn’t that right, Miriam?” he shouted over to the widow of the Las Vegas billionaire Sheldon Adelson.

‘Miriam and Sheldon would come into the [Oval] Office ... I think they had more trips to the White House than anybody else ... Look at her, sitting there so innocently. She’s got sixty billion in the bank. Sixty billion. [Laughter.] I think she’s saying “No, more!” And she loves Israel ... Her husband was a very aggressive man, but I loved him ... very supportive of me.;

The joke was on the liberal apologists for Netanyahu. In Europe the centrists and social democrats are terrified of the erosion of their states ability to decide what is to be hidden, and what has now not to be hidden. Clark comments: ‘Political hypocrisy, that essential lubricant, seems to be under threat.’ Politics is ‘shredding its skin’.

‘untruth consumes resources, at least on the scale now necessary. And resources will grow fewer, be fought for more ruthlessly. You cannot have a society of the spectacle without a constant increase in the rate of illusion.’

The grand imperial illusions of a mad man who would be king relies on destructive power projected as holy war against the unbelievers, be they leftists, liberals, immigrants, or whatever. Peter Thiel appears to equate AI Singularity with the Apocalypse. No doubt using the best of Palantir AI, he pronounces that Greta Thunberg is the new ‘Anti-Christ’, holding up his ‘Christian’ vision of mass surveillance and control powered by big-tech.

Feuerbach’s words from The Essence of Christianity, are used as the epigraph to Society of the Spectacle:

‘But for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, appearance to essence, truth is considered profane, and only illusion is sacred. Sacredness is in fact held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be seen as the highest degree of sacredness.‘

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