Debord x Bourriaud: A Remix Manifesto

It is our responsibility, in this generation, to accept our role in society in terms of the remix culture that we are all a part of. It is our duty as conscious participants to further the use of detournement and remix to build upon history to create a richer future. We are remixers and we live by a code:

• Plagiarism is necessary, progress implies it. All that was directly lived has moved away into a representation, inhabiting historicized styles and forms, reprogramming existing works and making use of images, and using society as a catalog of forms.
• Détournement not only leads to the discovery of new aspects of talent; it addition, clashing head-on with all social and legal conventions, it cannot fail to be a powerful cultural weapon in the service of a real class struggle. Life can never be too disorienting, cut, splice, delete, sample, loop, copy, reverse, build, destroy!
• It goes without saying that one is not limited to correcting a work or to integrating diverse fragments of out-of-date works into a new one; one can also alter the meaning of those fragments in any appropriate way, leaving the imbeciles to their slavish preservation of "citations."
• The spectacle presents itself at one and the same time as society itself, as a part of society, and as instrument of unification.
• Life burns to pour out through the diversity of sentiments, and thus rediscover itself in the sum of diversity. Ideas and realizations in the realm of détournement can be multiplied at will.
• It is obviously in the realm of the cinema that détournement can attain its greatest efficacy, and undoubtedly, for those concerned with this aspect, its greatest beauty. Considered in its own terms, the spectacle is the affirmation of appearance and the affirmation of all human life, that is to say social life, as simple appearance.
• Ultimately, any sign or word is susceptible to being converted into something else, even into its opposite. The spectacle is thus a specialized activity which speaks for the ensemble of others.

The methods that we have briefly dealt with here are presented not as our own invention, but as a generally widespread practice which we propose to systematize. Art functions as an active agent, how can we make do with what we have?