The Dérive : Melbourne Indymedia

In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop theirusual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. The element of chance is less determinant than one might think: from the dérive point of view cities have a psychogeographical relief, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes which strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones. But the dérive includes both this letting go and its necessary contradiction: the domination of psychogeographical variations by the knowledge and calculation of their possibilities. In this latter regard, ecological science - despite the apparently narrow social space to which it limits itself - provides psychogeography with abundant data. The ecological analysis of the absolute or relative character of fissures in the urban network, of the role of microclimates, of the distinct, self-contained character of administrative districts, and above all of the dominating action of centers of attraction, must be utilized and completed by psychogeographical methods. The objective passional terrain of the dérive must be defined in accordance both with its own logic and with its relations with social morphology.

In his study Paris et l’agglomémeration parisienne (Bibliothèque de Sociologie Contemporaine, PUF, 1952) Chombart de Lauwe notes that “an urban neighbourhood is determined not only by geographical and economic factors, but also by the image that its inhabitants and those of other neighborhoods have of it.” In the same work, in order to illustrate “the narrowness of the real Paris in which each individual lives . . within a geographical area whose radius is extremely small,” he diagrams all the movements made in the space of one year by a student living in the 16th arrondissement. Her itinerary delineates a small triangle with no GUY DEBORD 8 deviations, the three apexes of which are the School of Political Sciences, her residence and that of her piano teacher.

Such data - examples of a modern poetry capable of provoking sharp emotional reactions (in this case, indignation at the fact that there are people who live like that) - or even in Burgess’s theory of Chicago’s social activities as being distributed in distinct concentric zones, will undoubtedly prove useful in developing dérives. Chance plays an important role in dérives precisely because the methodology of psychogeographical observation is still in its infancy. But the action of chance is naturally conservative and in a new setting of variants, and to habit. Progress is nothing other than breaking though a field where chance holds sway by creating new conditions more favorable to our purposes. We can say, then, that the randomness of the dérive is fundamentally different from that of the stroll, but also that the first psychogeographical attractions discovered run the risk of fixating the dériving individual or group around new habitual axes, to which they will constantly be drawn back.

An insufficient awareness of the limitations of chance, and of its inevitably reactionary use, condemned to dismal failure the celebrated aimless ambulation attempted in 1923 by four surrealists, beginning from a small town chosen by lot: wandering in the open country is naturally depressing, and the interventions of chance are poorer there than anywhere else. But the mindlessness is pushed much farther by a certain Pierre Vendryes (in Médium, May 1954), who believes he can put this anecdote in the same category with various probability experiments on the grounds that they are all supposedly involved in the same sort of antideterminist liberation. He gives as an example the random distribution of tadpoles in a circular aquarium, adding, significantly, “It is necessary, of course, that such a population be subject to no external guiding influence.” In these conditions, the palm really should go to the tadpoles, who have the advantage of being “as stripped as possible of intelligence, sociability and sexuality,” and consequently “truly independent from one another.” At the opposite pole from these imbecilities, the primarily urban character of the dérive, in its element in the great industrially transformed cities - those centers of possibilities and meanings - 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.

THEORY OF THE DÉRIVE

One can dérive alone, but all indications are that the most fruitful numerical arrangement consists of several small groups of two or three people who have reached the same awakening of consciousness, since the cross-checking of these different groups’ impressions makes it possible to arrive at objective conclusions. It is preferable for the composition of these groups to change from one dérive to another. With more than four or five participants, the specifically dérive character rapidly diminishes, and 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.

The average duration of a dérive is one day, considered as the time between two periods of sleep. The times of beginning and ending have no necessary relation to the solar day, but it should be noted that the last hours of the night are generally unsuitable for dérives. But this duration is merely a statistical average. For one thing, the dérive rarely occurs in its pure form: it is difficult for the participants to avoid setting aside an hour or two at the beginning or end of the day for taking care of banal tasks; and toward the end of the day fatigue tends to encourage such an abandonment. But even more importantly, the dérive often takes place within a deliberately limited period of a few hours, or even fortuitously during fairly brief moments; or over a period of several days without interruption. In spite of the cessations imposed by the need for sleep, certain dérives of a sufficient intensity have been sustained for three or four days, or even longer. 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. One sequence of dérives was pursued without notable interruption for around two months. Such an experience gives rise to new objective conditions of behavior, which bring about the disappearance of a good number of the old ones.

2 The influence of weather on dérives, although real, is a determining factor only in the case of prolonged rains, which make them virtually impossible. But storms or other types of precipitation are rather favorable for dérives.

The spatial field of the dérive may be precisely delimited or vague, depending on whether the activity is aimed at studying a terrain or at emotional disorientation. It must not be forgotten that these two aspects of the dérive overlap in many ways so that it is impossible to isolate one of GUY DEBORD 10 them in a pure state. But the use of taxis, for example, can provide a clear enough line of demarcation between them: if in the course of a dérive one takes a taxi, either to get to a specific destination or simply to move twenty minutes to the west, one is concerned primarily with a personal trip outside one’s usual surroundings. If, on the other hand, one sticks to the direct exploration of a particular terrain, one is concentrating primarily on research for a psychogeographical urbanism.

In every case the spatial field depends first of all on the point of departure - the residence of the solo dériver or the meeting place selected by a group. The maximum area of this spatial field does not extend beyond the entirety of a large city and its suburbs. At its minimum it can be limited to a small self-contained ambiance: a single neighbourhood or even a single block of houses if it’s worth it (the extreme case being the staticdérive of an entire day within the Saint Lazare train station).

The exploration of a fixed spatial field thus presupposes the determining of bases and the calculation of directions of penetration. It is here that the study of maps comes in - ordinary ones as well as ecological and psychogeographical ones - along with their rectification and improvement. It should go without saying that we are not at all interested in any mere exoticism that may arise from the fact that one is exploring a neighborhood for the first time. Besides its unimportance, this aspect of the problem is completely subjective and rapidly disappears in the process of the dérive.

In the “possible rendezvous,” on the other hand, the element of exploration is minimal in comparison with that of behavioral disorientation. the subject is invited to come alone to a specified place at a specified time. He is freed from the bothersome obligations of the ordinary rendezvous since there is no one to wait for. But since this “possible rendezvous has brought him without warning to a place he may or may not know, he observes the surroundings. It may be that the same spot has been specified for a “possible rendezvous” for someone else whose identity he has no way of knowing. Since he may never have even seen the other person before, he will be incited to start up conversations with various passersby. He may meet no one, or he may by chance meet the person who has arranged the “possible rendezvous.” In any case, particularly if the time and place have been well chosen, the subject’s use of time will take an unexpected turn. He may even telephone someone else who doesn’t know where the first “possible rendezvous” has taken him, in order to ask

THEORY OF THE DÉRIVE
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for another one to be specified. One can see the virtually unlimitedresources of this pastime. Thus a loose lifestyle and even certain amusements considered dubious that have always been enjoyed among our entourage - slipping by night into houses undergoing demolition, hitchhiking nonstop and without destination through Paris during a transportation strike in the name of adding to the confusion, wandering in subterranean catacombs forbidden to the public, etc. - are expressions of a more general sensibility which is nothing other than that of the dérive. Written descriptions can be no more than passwords to this great game.

The lessons drawn from the dérive permit the drawing up of the first surveys of the psychogeographical articulations of a modern city. Beyond the discovery of unities of ambiance, of their main components and their spatial localization, one comes to perceive their principal axes of passage, their exits and their defenses. One arrives at the central hypothesis of the existence of psychogeographical pivotal points. One measures the distances that effectively separate two regions of a city, distances that may have little relation with the physical distance between them. With the aid of old maps, aerial photographs and experimental dérives, one can draw up hitherto lacking maps of influences, maps whose inevitable imprecision at this early stage is no worse than that of the first navigational charts; the only difference is that it is a matter no longer of precisely delineating stable continents, but of changing architecture and urbanism.

Today the different unities of atmosphere and of dwellings are not precisely marked off, but are surrounded by more or less extended and indistinct bordering regions. The most general change that the dérive leads to promising is the constant diminution of these border regions, up to the point of their complete suppression. Within architecture itself, the taste for dériving tends to promote all sorts of new forms of labyrinths made possible by modern techniques of construction. Thus in March 1955 the press reported the construction in New York of a building in which one can see the first signs of an opportunity to dérive inside an apartment:

“The apartments of the helicoidal house will have the form of slices of cake. One will be able to augment or diminish them by shifting moveable partitions. The half-floor gradations avoid limiting the number of rooms, since the tenant can request the use of the adjacent section on either upper or lower levels. This system permits the transformation of GUY DEBORD 12 three four-room apartments into one twelve-room apartment in less than six hours.”

(To be continued.)

Notes
1 Editor’s note: This work first appeared in the second issue of Internationale Situationniste (December 1958) and a slightly different version was published in Les Lèvres Nues, 9 (November 1956) along with accounts of two dérives. This translation first appeared in Situationist International Anthology, ed. by Ken Knabb (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), pp. 50-54. This text is anti-copyright and may be freely reproduced.

2 Knabb’s note: “The dérive (with its flow of acts, its gestures, its strolls, its encounters) was to the totality exactly what psychoanalysis (in the best sense) is to language. Let yourself go with the flow of words, says the analyst. He listens, until the moment when he rejects or modifies (one could say detourns) a word, an expression or a definition. The dérive is certainly a technique, almost a therapeutic one. But just as analysis without anything else is almost always contraindicated, so the continual dérive is dangerous to the extent that the individual, having gone too far (not without bases, but . . .) without defences, is threatened with explosion, dissolution, dissociation, disintegration. And thence the relapse into what is termed ‘ordinary life,’ that is to say, in reality, into ‘petrified life.’ In this regard I now repudiate the Formulary’s propaganda for a continual dérive. Yes, continual like the poker game at Las Vegas, but continual for a certain period, limited to Sunday for some, to a week as a good average; a month, that’s a lot. In 1953-1954 we dérived for three or four months; that’s the extreme limit, the critical point. It’s a miracle it didn’t kill us.” (Ivan Chtcheglov, ‘Letters from Afar’, Internationale Situationniste, 9 (1964), p. 38.)