One sense of dériver is “to divert.” But from what does the dérive divert us? The Situationist might reply that it diverts us, our experience and our lives, from the dominance of the Spectacle. If we choose to go on a dérive, we must beware that it doesn’t become a death dérive. The dérive has sometimes drifted in the direction of proto-post-mortemism.

However, it can also mean going adrift and falling into the abyss at the far reaches of modernity. The dérive can mean drifting outside the constraints of conventional perception. But one must wonder why one would be in such a hurry if the point is to experience the city? Perhaps we should take inspiration from the “Slow Food Movement” and initiate a “Slow Foot Movement.” Much of the appeal of the dérive is, after all, its driftlike quality, and dérive rapide, much like cuisine rapide, seems like a contradictio in adjecto.Īlso, why must a dérive move not only with rapidity, but through “ambiences” in particular? This sounds rather suspiciously like sightseeing and do we really need another technique, especially an italicized one? Perhaps we can’t dispense entirely with means, but if the dérive were to slow down and become more patient and less goal directed, the dériveur might find more of what the city has to offer. “through varied ambiances.” Some descriptions indicate that these qualities describe precisely the manner in which the Situationists carried out the dérive, either rushing around on foot or even taking taxis. Let us consider the idea of the dérive as: 1. Does the Situationist dérive maintain too much of a distance from the urban phenomena it encounters or might encounter? Does it lack a sufficient level of passionate attraction to the urban milieu? Is it too focused on the world of visible things to the neglect of other modes of experience? Does it sometimes lapse into an anti-spectacular spectacularism? Does it uncritically preserve a traditional one-sided, masculinist perspective, exalting its own world of “power and adventure”? Does it sometimes fail to escape that curse of late modernity, cynical rationality? Do you somehow already know what the answer to all these questions is going to be? However, some questions arise about the adequacy of the dérive as a mode of experiencing the city, and as a means of pursuing this admirable project.

This project can only be seen as entirely admirable. Guy Debord describes the dérive, or drift, the classic Situationist mode of exploring the city, as “a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances” involving “playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects.” The dérive was central to Situationist urbanism and was part of a project of challenging the ways in which Spectacular-Commodity Society dominates our experience and our sensibilities, and envisioning a new city beyond the limits of the Spectacle.

Bird of a death dream clarence laughlin