Background to Situationists International: active 1958-1972, international, European organization of social revolutionaries comprised of avant-garde artists, intellectuals and political theorists. See anti-authoritarian Marxism, Dada and Surrealism. Guy DeBord ‘The Society of the Spectacle’. Concept of the spectacle - a critique of advanced capitalism concerned with the increased tendency for expression and mediation of social relations through objects. Consumption. Commodities. Psychogeography. This essay was published in Internationale Situationniste #2 (Paris, December 1958).
Bureau of Public Secrets… I like this already. Thank you, Ken Knabb.
dérive: “...a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences; … playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects” (1)
Dérive occurs when one drops one’s relations, work, lesiure, and other usual motives for actions, to be drawn psychologically into the surrounding terrain (geography?) and what they encounter there. Both a letting-go and grasping of knowledge -possibilities of the terrain- occur.
“The objective passional terrain of the dérive must be defined in accordance both with its own logic and with its relations with social morphology.” (1)
Subjectively and objectively. Collection of movement data, paths taken and avoided, useful in constructing dérives. Hmm … are they rambles with a map (GPS, smartphone) in hand?
Chance -important, but less than one thinks it might be.
“... the action of chance is naturally conservative and in a new setting tends to reduce everything to habit or to an alternation between a limited number of variants. Progress means breaking through fields where chance holds sway by creating new conditions more favorable to our purposes.” (1-2)
We return, again and again, to what has attracted us before.
“...limitations of chance…” (2)
It is a misconception to understand chance as ‘anything goes’ or ‘anything could happen’. Chance always has some external force it is subject to.
“... the primarily urban character of the dérive, … could be expressed in Marx’s phrase: “Men can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is alive.” (2)
We are attracted to the psychogeographical in/of the dérive like Narcissus to his reflection in the water.
To dérive alone or in small groups … Debord suggests small groups, …
“... small groups of two or three people who have reached the same level of awareness, since cross- checking these different groups’ impressions makes it possible to arrive at more objective conclusions.”
I don’t agree that this would facilitate the arrival at more objective conclusions because, even if the group consists of individuals who have reached the same level of awareness, it is still a group of individuals attracted to their own image.
“... in any case it is impossible for there to be more than ten or twelve people without the dérive fragmenting into several simultaneous dérives. The practice of such subdivision is in fact of great interest, but the difficulties it entails have so far prevented it from being organized on a sufficient scale.” (2)
I question if any dérive undertaken in a group of any size would not ultimately lead to its fragmentation into simultaneous dérives equal to the number of participants. Studying the fragmentations side by side would be interesting, and probably more telling in terms of ‘objective conclusions’ than what would come from a small group whose impressions were understood in the singular.
“... a dérive often takes place within a deliberately limited period of a few hours, or even fortuitously during fairly brief moments; or it may last for several days without interruption. … It is true that in the case of a series of dérives over a rather long period of time it is almost impossible to determine precisely when the state of mind peculiar to one dérive gives way to that of another. ” (2)
It seems to me that time as a framework is either unnecessary or at least not adequate in its application to the dérive. Therefore shouldn’t the discussion of time be left out of the discussion of the dérive, other than to clarify it’s inadequacy? I would think the same might be the case when describing the relationship of the spatial field to the dérive as put forth by the author. Both of these, like chance, are dependent upon external forces, namely the goals/intention of the dérive participants in relation to the starting point (place, place in time).
“The maximum area of this spatial field does not extend beyond the entirety of a large city and its suburbs.” (3)
What about a dérive that does cross physical borders? Sixty years after this was written can we envision a cyber dérive, one that crosses virtual borders?
“... behavioral disorientation of the possible rendezvous …” (3)
Could this be what happens with online gaming?
“One can see the virtually unlimited resources of this pastime.” (3)
A recent article on a paper published in June 2017 by the United States National Bureau of Economic Research: