Detournement article

Okay I've just finished reading the detournement article by Guy Debord and I don't really get what this guy is talking about...

What I understood was that detournement is a fresh and innovative way to create new works by combining different materials. He argues that no matter how contradicting the materials used are, the finished piece will always link the materials together to form a new meaning (the contradiction can be the meaning in itself.) Another pro of detournment is that it can be mass reproduced as there are limitless combinations of works.

Then he starts to relate detournment with metagraphics and writing, which starts to get a but confusing for me. First of all I don't know what metagraphics mean...so I plugged it in on the wiki and it gives me the definition, "merges poetry (text) with more visual (graphic) ways of communication such as painting, illustration or signs." I understood this to be some form of mixed media art, possibly closest to the ads we see everyday.

After he talks about how titles are strongly linked to detournement as well. I guess that the title usually uses quoted material (similar to what we did in phase 1) to form a new meaning with the visual that accompanies it.

Shortly after, he talks about the laws of detournement.

From what I understood from this article, detournement relates closely to art and advertising. I can't seem to find anything that doesn't fall in the category of detournement besides original literature (but then what is original.) Detournement is a useful tool because it gives us a deeper level of understanding by linking the material used to create it together. Usually humor is raised when someone links the materials together if they contradict. However a down side to this is that if things are increasingly detourned, then what is the base of all things? This raises the problem questioned by Baudrillard's simulacra.

source: www.wikipedia.org