Situationism: The Art of the Dérive

Our explorations of Situationism, that eccentric twentieth-century offspring of a drunken amour between avant-garde European art and radical post-Marxist politics, have already led in strange directions. The ground we’ve covered so far extends from postwar Paris to Lower Slobbovia and from Marxist dialectical materialism to the occult perspectives that most Marxists despise utterly. Nonetheless the practical applications mentioned so far have remained on familiar ground.

I’ve done that deliberately, partly because it’s a good idea to take the movement toward high strangeness a step at a time, and partly to reflect current understandings, or misunderstandings, of Situationism itself. Those are inevitable, since it so happens that most discussions of Situationism—at least since the Situationist International blew itself apart in a typical round of fringe group quarrels—have presented the movement in very one-sided ways.

You’ve got the Marxist interpreters whose main concern is to squash the innovative elements of Situationist thought and practice back into the iron coffin of Marxist orthodoxy. You’ve got the libertarian interpreters whose main concern is to pass over in perfect silence those elements of Situationist thought that criticize capitalist culture. You’ve got the people who just think that détournement is fun and borrow such scraps of Situationist rhetoric that justify it. Then, of course, you’ve got the people whose sole exposure to Situationism is some online article written by a guy who skimmed The Society of the Spectacle a couple of years ago and talks about those bits of Debord’s ideas that catch his fancy.

The result is that most current discussions of Situationism focus on the concept of the Spectacle and the strategy of détournement, and neglect most of the rest of what the Situationists had to say, or do. Mind you, that concept and that strategy have plenty to offer, which is why I spent a good deal of time talking about them, but they’re not the be-all and end-all of the movement.

It would be just as workable to found a discussion of Situationism on the concept of psychogeography and the strategy of the dérive, as these were just important as the more popular points just named, but very few people do that. For that matter, there’s the central concept of the construction and development of situations, which has dropped almost entirely out of collective memory. It’s past time to remedy some of those omissions.

Let’s begin with the dérive. The French word dérive (pronounced day-REEVE) means “drift.” The verb dériver means “to drift,” “to divert,” and “to derive.” In Situationist terms, a dérive is a journey without a destination, though not without a purpose.

Guy Debord, in his essay “Theory of the Dérive,” describes the technique precisely: “In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.” Start walking in a direction chosen on a whim, with no purpose in mind other than paying attention to what you encounter, and let the experience of each moment guide you in the direction you take: that’s a basic form of dérive.

There are at least three purposes to this deceptively simple activity, beyond the simple playful enjoyments of an activity unconstrained by the pressures of economic necessity or the tawdry seductions of the mass media. First, it is a way to explore and set aside one’s unthinking habits. Debord, in the essay already quoted, describes a sociological study from 1952 that studied the movements of a college student over an entire year, and found that they were limited to a small triangle with its vertices defined by her apartment, her college, and the residence of her piano teacher. In a city as rich in potential human experience as Paris in 1950 or so, this is appallingly limited—but how many of us, in our daily and yearly rounds, really touch on a broader range of experiences than this?

The dérive is one way out of the ruts worn into your life by the force of habit. Let go of your ordinary purposes and goals, let yourself experience your surroundings, and follow whatever prompts you receive from that experience, and you can very easily find yourself in wholly unfamiliar spaces, encountering people, places, and things that would be outside your experience under other circumstances. You step into a wider world, one less constrained by your past and freighted with unpredictable potentials for your future.

Another purpose of the dérive unfolds from this first set of effects. The habits that constrain most people’s lives are not of their own making. The ruts they follow were traced out from infancy on by social forces acting through parents, teachers, and the mass media. Nor, of course, do those ruts exist for the benefit of those who trudge through them day after day, though of course that claim gets made over and over again.

A quirky metaphor from the Discordian tradition may help to clarify this. One of the plot engines in Robert Shea’s and Robert Anton Wilson’s grand Discordian fantasy Illuminatus! involves seeing the fnords. Fnords? According to Shea and Wilson, the word “fnord” is inserted all over written media, in newspapers, magazines, and books, but we’ve all been hypnotized in school not to notice it when it appears. Instead, we get frightened, without realizing why.

The more fnords we see, the more frightened we get, and this allows us to be pushed this way and that by the powers that be, usually without realizing it. To see the fnords—to break through the conditioning and realize that there are words printed in the newspaper that we look right past, but that affect us emotionally anyway, and distort our reactions to the world—is an important initiatory experience in Illuminatus!, and one that liberates certain characters from lifelong burdens of fear that are familiar to us all.

Of course the word “fnord” doesn’t actually appear anywhere outside of certain works of fringe literature like this one, but as usual with Discordianism, the over-the-top absurdity is a way to talk about some of the important but unmentionable realities of our time. Take a good hard look at a news website or any other steaming lump of excreta fresh from the orifices of the corporate media, very much including what passes for entertainment these days, and you’ll see the fnords, all right. A little background in classical rhetoric will help you spot them, but ordinary common sense and a little suspicion directed toward motives can often do the job all by themselves.

Pay special attention to the things you’re supposed to be frightened of. Of course there are things that require reasonable caution and wariness in today’s world. It remains true that more often than not these days, the nice smiling person who offers to save you from the scary thing is far more dangerous to your life and liberty than the scary thing is.

Dérives are, among other things, a way to see the fnords. While there are certainly places that it’s genuinely dangerous to go, and it’s wise to avoid those unless you know what you’re doing, there are many others we shy away from for reasons that have nothing to do with personal safety and everything to do with fnords.

When you set out on a dérive, notice what you avoid, and think about why you avoid it. You don’t have to ignore the intuition, if that’s what it is, and go there anyway, but learn to recognize your reaction, and do some research afterwards. Is the sense of danger you felt, assuming that’s what it was, based on current realities? Is it based on childhood experiences, and if so, are they actually relevant? Or is it based purely on the frenzied production of fnords by the corporate media or some other supposedly authoritative source?

This leads us in turn to the third potential purpose of the dérive, the one that the Situationists themselves considered its most important feature: its possibilities as an instrument for exploring the psychogeography of human environments.

Psychogeography? That’s something we all experience and most of us studiously ignore. Every space through which human beings move has effects on the thoughts and feelings of those who pass through it. Those effects vary somewhat from person to person but they’re not wholly subjective: most people are affected by the same spaces in broadly similar ways. There’s been a lot of discussion of the zeitgeist (literally, “time spirit”) of different historical periods, but too little of the corresponding concept of the raumgeist, the “space spirit” of different locations.

Natural environments are very powerful in their effects on human beings, which is why people fly thousands of miles to gaze down into the Grand Canyon or walk to local parks to sit on the grass and enjoy sunlight filtered through leaves. Built environments, however, are equally potent. Outside of a scattering of famous monuments, those don’t get much attention, because the most important things that structure built environments are differentials of power, privilege, and status—and especially the thing we don’t talk about in modern industrial societies, the power, privilege, and status of different social classes.

I’ve noted in previous essays here and elsewhere, for example, that the standard architectural forms used by corporate and government bureaucracies are images of domination. The faces they turn to the world outside are blank, sterile, and forbidding, a rejection of human scale and human interaction given physical form in glass, steel, and concrete.

None of this is accidental. It’s meant to communicate something very specific to those outside the walls: “Your opinions don’t matter and neither do you. We make the decisions and your only role is to do what we tell you, peasant.” Since this is the standard attitude of bureaucracies in the modern managerial state, enshrined in the cult of professional expertise and given teeth by a carefully cultivated obsession with formal credentials in place of practical competence, the psychogeography of the modern office building can be seen as a straightforward expression of power relationships as the designers and builders of office buildings want them to be.

Yet psychogeography also has subtler and more interesting dimensions. A psychogeographical boundary, for example, cuts across the landscape close to where I live in Silver Spring, Maryland. Along Georgia Avenue, and for several blocks to either side, is a built-up area of soaring apartment complexes and office towers. Go a few blocks further east, and you reach a zoning boundary that runs as straight as a laser north and south: uphill to the west, multistory apartment buildings; downhill to the east, small suburban houses from the early twentieth century, each with its own little yard in front and back.

What makes all this particularly intriguing, at least to me, is that the physical boundary is not the psychogeographical one. That’s a block and a half or so further west. There, in among the office and apartment towers, you’ll spot a handful of businesses in one- or two-story structures left over from the days when Silver Spring was one of those sleepy bedroom communities with its own little commercial district along the streetcar line.

There aren’t many of these businesses—an auto repair shop, a boxing gym, a couple of downscale restaurants, a gas station, and so on—but as you pass them the ambience along the street changes. Even though many of the business signs are in Amharic as well as English, reflecting the lively local Ethiopian immigrant community in Silver Spring, once you pass the transition zone the raumgeist of the old neighborhood is still palpable.

It takes careful attention to the landscape to catch such cues, and this is one advantage of the dérive. If you set aside all your ordinary concerns and simply pay attention to your surroundings while moving through them at an ordinary walking pace, your chance of noticing such things goes up sharply. This is especially true if you’re in an area unfamiliar to you, where you haven’t yet laid down a pattern of memories and habitual interpretations to guide your reactions. Again, the art of the dérive includes that among its practical rules.

There is of course another way to understand all this, one that brings all its features into tight focus, though it’s one that the original Situationists would have rejected with quite some heat. In one of the most remarkable examples of convergent evolution on record, starting from the least promising starting point imaginable—Marxist dialectical materialism, of all things—the Situationists succeeded in reinventing the art of divination.

Consider the tarot card reader as she casts and interprets a reading. She has no way of knowing in advance which of the 78 cards will turn up in the reading, nor whether they will be upright or reversed—this makes a difference in most forms of tarot divination. Of those 156 possibilities, those that appear in the reading provide cryptic cues to a kind of abstract psychogeography of the question she is trying to answer. The same attention to half-sensed subtleties that leads a wandering artist on a dérive to turn this way instead of that leads the reader to select this interpretation of the card instead of that, and provide an answer to herself or her client that highlights new possibilities and offers an alternative to existing habits of thought and action.

Other modes of divination, for that matter, come even closer to the dérive. Some ancient Greek oracles, for example, had those who needed advice from the gods make their offering in the temple, then block their ears with their fingers, walk out the temple door into the crowded agora outside, and unblock their ears. The first words they heard thereafter were the gods’ answer to their question. Even further over into dérive territory is the knightly quest, as seen in the Grail legends among other sources; the knights who sought the Grail simply rode out into the Waste Land, and let whatever they encountered lead them to the castle of the Fisher King.

The same principle can be used in other ways, to be sure. One of the best ways to break out of mental ruts in the age of the internet is to make sure that the news and opinion sites you read include those from viewpoints you find baffling, absurd, or detestable. Pay attention to your reactions, especially the automatic hostility such things so often evoke, and see if you can figure out what’s behind those reactions; if you’re honest with yourself, you’ll find that abstract love of truth plays a much smaller role in them than you want to admit. When a claim of fact appears, look it up in some neutral source, if you can find one, and see where it leads you.

Mind you, unless you want to be banished to the fringes, I don’t recommend talking publicly about the insights you get in this way. The hatred that so many people fling at their notional opposites in today’s politics and culture is nothing compared to the rage they display when somebody breaks out of whatever rigid binary both sides have embraced, by noting flaws in the positions of both sides or by offering a third option. Still, that’s a risk that creative thinkers tolerably often have to run.

Despite all this, there’s still also much to be said for the old-fashioned dérive as it was practiced by the Situationists themselves. There are complicated forms of it, involving messages and prearranged phone calls, but you can find those in any good anthology of Situationist writings and it’s best to start with the simplest form. You can do it on your own, but Debord mentions that it seems to work best in a group of two to five people; with more than that, it tends to split up naturally into two or more separate dérives. He also insists that dérives can only be done in large urban areas, but there he just demonstrates that he was a city kid through and through; if you know the countryside you can learn just as much there, though the distances tend to be longer and a bicycle is a useful accessory.

Literally or figuratively, give it a try. Head into unknown territory, following no more definite guide than your own intuition. See where it takes you and what adventures you have on the way. We’ll talk more about that in a later post.