détournement, briefly

In "Methods of Détournement", Debord says "not many people would remain unaffected by an exact reconstruction in one city of an entire neighborhood of another." Life can never be too disorienting: détournement on this level would really make it beautiful." It's a striking analogy, interesting to consider in terms of real-life applicability. Seems true that "not many people would remain unaffected", but how exactly would it affect us? Would it highlight a fundamental difference between communities? Would it highlight a fundamental sameness between communities? The idea reminds me of a sculpture called South Facing 4.3 (2006) by David Cotterrell. The piece is a city plan that consists of a thousand miniature white plaster models of residential high-rise towers that replicate Shanghai's officially sanctioned building designs, with each structure facing south at least fifteen degrees. If that characteristic of Shanghai, which is dictated by the Chinese government due to traditions that I know nothing about, was detourned into my city what would the détournement mean without the context of those traditions? I like that Debord doesn't isolate the practice to art making, and as a result I found his ideas most interesting in relation to language and social behavior. "Ultimately, any sign or word is susceptible to being converted into something else, even into its opposite." I imagine every person speaking and acting in his/her own code, and wonder if it's true that life can never be too disorienting. This seems to largely be about disunity, about taking things apart for the sake of it, not to create new associations. There's something disappointingly hollow in that. In "Postproduction", Bourriaud describes it like this: "The Situationists extolled la derive (or drift), a technique of navigating through various urban settings as if they were film sets. These situations, which had to be constructed, were experienced, ephemeral, and immaterial works, an art of the passing of time resistant to any fixed limitations." Does that equal a worldview where any given environment you encounter is a facsimile of the idea of another environment, a somehow "realer" environment? In that case drift is both attractive and depressing in its apparent absence of attachment. But have you ever been on a film set?