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"We wish to transform these times".

Article Excerpt
Tom McDonough. "The Beautiful Language of My Century": Reinventing the Language of Contestation in Postwar France, 1945-1968. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. 273 pp., 50 b/w ills. $34.95

Written in 1957 and first published in 1959, Guy Debord's book Memories announces on its title page that it is "composed entirely from prefabricated elements." (1) Bound in sandpaper to destroy all neighboring books, the appropriated fragments contained therein include textual snippets from unnamed sources (ultimately revealed to range from detective novels and geographic manuals to literati such as William Shakespeare and Charles Baudelaire), as well as photographs, comic strips, various maps, building plans, historical etchings, and advertisements. These fragments, arranged and chosen by Debord, are overlaid with Asger Jorn's swirls and splotches of paint, which vary in color from red, yellow, and blue to pinks, acid greens, and purples. In its use of prior work, this "anti-book" (Debord's term) presents an early instance of the procedure of detournement practiced by Debord and the Situationist International (SI)--that is, Memoires uses "preexisting artistic elements in a new ensemble" and "through the organization of another meaningful ensemble ... confers on each element [a] new scope and effect." (2)

Tom McDonough's "The Beautiful Language My Century": Reinventing, the Language of Contestation in Postwar France, 1945--1968 takes its title from the final fragment of appropriated language in Memoires: "Je voulais parler la belle langue de mon siecle" (I wanted to speak the beautiful language of my century), a line lifted from Baudelaire. That the title derives from an appropriated text is key, setting up one of McDonough's primary concerns: detournement as a form of "cultural theft" (9) through which any work, high or low, might be altered to "assume a new, subversive meaning" (15). McDonough's larger claim, how ever, deals more specifically with how such appropriation might be transformed into "bases for a renewed political anion" (20) Herein lie the book's real slakes: to argue for a politicized model of the neo-avant-garde and thereby to offer "a historical account of the development of various forms of critical culture in the years prior to May '68 in France, and to explore how those forms have come down to us in the present" (8).

McDonough structures each chapter according to specific case studies that locate practices of negation within a wider politico-aesthetic field. Chapter I, "The Language of Negation," situates detournement in relation to postwar debates in France concerning language, appropriation, and political commitment. In this context, McDonough revisits the German literary critic Peter Burger's controversial 1974 thesis concerning what Burger terms the neo-avantgarde. For Burger, the postwar neo avant garde rehearsed the practices of the early-twentieth century historical avant-gardes in an institutional context that the latter set out to destroy. Dada's relentless antiart negativity was...

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