Apart from the idea itself, I love this quote by Guy Debord because it's recursive plagiarism.
It was originally written by Lautréamont in 1870.
"Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism
is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author’s phrase, makes use of
his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea."
Debord cheekily inserted it in The Society of Spectacle, 1967.
Here's the page from Lautréamont's Poesies II, in the French original.
The brilliance of Debord is that he realised that the facsimile can be more true than the primal matter, just as there is often truths hidden in myths that are deeper than the real thing.
#situationism #lautreamont #debord #situationisme #situationists #guydebord
https://social.coop/media/bCO8j_T1L_iYVfOO8Z4
So prescient and deep that we haven't yet got anywhere close to these ideas, we can barely flirt with them on social media.
Lautréamont died the next year, he was only 24 years old, his grave disappeared shortly after. Andre Breton unearthed his works much later in the 1920s, the surrealists made Lautréamont their patron saint.
Fast forward to 1985, Richard Stallman, FF to 2001, Creative Commons, more than 130 years after Lautréamont.
Hopefully the dream is not too far off now.
h