While written in another context, these lines from Becker-Ho seem to apply: ==“Time and again in all the works dealing with the same subjects and sharing the same sources, one finds the same bits of information paraphrased more or less successfully, often with the same words endlessly repeated. Other people’s findings, acknowledged in underhand fashion, re-emerge as so many new discoveries, stripped of quotation marks and references, and more often than not adding nothing to what is already known on the subject.== But what this does is allow the whole field of information going unchallenged to be enlarged quantitatively, and on the cheap...”^12 Culture is nothing if not what the Situationists called ==détournement : the plagiarizing, hijacking, seducing, detouring, of past texts, images, forms, practices, into others.== **The trick is to realize in the process the undermining of the whole idea of the author as owner, of culture as property, that détournement always implies.** Thus this study makes no claims to originality. Rather, in its act of inflating the whole field of information on the cheap, it seeks only to encourage others in this far from fine art of cultural inflation. The Situationist archive is there to be plundered. Unlike BeckerHo, The Spectacle of Disintegration makes no proprietary claims, but it does set out to be a version of these materials of use to us now.^14 It’s the past we need for the critique of this present.
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