The beautiful language of my century

McDonough explores the montage practice developed by Guy Debord and his situationist colleagues under the name of “détournement” and its expression in the later fifties as a form of cultural theft. He addresses the influence of colonialism on these practices, examining a 1961 exhibit of torn posters of the Algerian War (“La France déchirée”), Godard’s early film “Le Petit Soldat,” and Christo’s “Project for a Temporary Wall of Steel Drums.” He discusses the French left’s adoption in the mid-sixties of the “end of art” as a theoretical position and describes the leftist idea of the “fête” as a Rabelaisian and revolutionary upwelling of everything that is low. This influential conception, inspired equally by the American urban revolts of the sixties and the writings of theorists Marcel Mauss and Georges Bataille, coalesced into a new image of revolution, a new model of contestation, in the events of May 1968–when the struggle over language and culture merged with a broader resistance to capitalist modernization.