Dérive and Psychogeography

fragments of people’s experiences together into the understanding and meanings of the metropolis.

According to Chris Jenks’ argument, the flâneur as a concept could be used as “an analytic form, a narrative device, an attitude towards knowledge and its social context,” and it is also “an image of movement through the social space of

modernity” (Jenks 17). That is to say, because of unconstrained characteristics of this figure, we can use it as a lens to see our society, a device to present observation and thoughts, and an analytic form to illuminate social issues. It is like “a multilayered palimpsest” that enables us to “move” from “real products of modernity,” through

“the practical organization of space and its negotiation by inhabitants of a city,” to “a critical appreciation of the state of modernity and its erosion into the post-” (17).¹⁴

B. Dérive and Psychogeography

It continues its street reading “from Baudelaire through Surrealism to the Situationist International” (24). Debord’s dérive is “relevant to the walking methodologist (the flâneur within the [post] modern city)” (24). Therefore, Jenks refuses the

simplification and homogenization of the flâneur, and dérive could be taken as an aspect of the broader concept of flânerie.

Guy Debord elaborates the practice of dérive through which the flâneur could undertake the investigation on the relationship between city people and urban space:

Among the various situationist method is the dérive [literally: ‘drifting’], a technique of transient passage through varied ambiances. The derive entails playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects;

14 Jenks discards the simplification and homogeneity of the flâneur. Instead, he presents it as a concept with which we can form an understanding of carious issues of the city and subject matters of

(post)modernity without the restriction of time, space, gender, and class. Besides, its traces could be found in different domains such as politics, society, economics, and literature. As what John Rignall states in his article “Benjamin’s Flâneur and the Problem of Realism:” the flâneur is “constituted intertextually” because we can find its application in Baudelaire’s essays and poetry, Poe’s fiction and Balzac’s, Dickens’ letters, Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, and documentary and historical writings about Paris (Rignall 113).

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completely distinguishes it from the classical notions of the journey and the stroll.

In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual 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. (Situationist International Anthology 50) According to Debord’s definition, Jenks further explains that the dérive does not refer to simply drifting with passivity but “demands a response to inducement, albeit unplanned and unstructured” (Jenks 24). “In the ‘dérive’ the explorer of the city follows whatever cue, or indeed clue, that the streets offer as enticement to fascination” (25). Nevertheless, it does not demonstrate the total submission to unconscious desire that characterizes surrealist wanderings. Debord criticizes the surrealist aimless ambulation for its “insufficient awareness of the limitations of chance” (Situationist International Anthology 51). Coverley states that “[t]he dérive may lack a clear destination but it is not without purpose” (96). It aims at seizing the city whose seductive surface misrepresents the repressive realities of capitalist consumption. Therefore, situationists want to embrace chance as an emblem of freedom and to encounter the heterogeneous in the reified society as what surrealists try to practice. Moreover, they also aim at transforming the urban space through a psychogeographical investigation that examines the ways in which the areas resonate with particular ambiences.

According to Debord’s definition, psychogeography is the point where psychology and geography collide:

Geography, for example, deals with the determinant action of general natural forces, such as soil composition or climate conditions, on the

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economic structures of a society, and thus on the corresponding conception that such a society can have of the world. Psychogeography could set for itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals. (Situationist International Anthology 5)

Therefore, what psychogeography shows is the relationship between the individual state of mind and the environmental elements. What it contains is not the rigid zones or routes that define the order of a place. Actually, it is composed of fragments of special climates and spontaneous turns of direction taken by a subject who disregards the useful connection by which his conduct is ordinarily governed. Therefore, “[t]he city begins . . . to take on the characteristics of a map of the mind” (Jenks 25). Debord mentions the significance of such “renovated cartography”: “[t]he production of psychogeographic maps…can contribute to clarifying certain wanderings that express not subordination to randomness but complete insubordination to habitual influences”

(Situationist International Anthology 7). These influences determine habitual patterns of the residents, but what the map presents is a contrast to such repetitive, usual directives. Psychogeography shows the spontaneous tendencies for orientation of a subject who traverses the city without regarding practical consideration, and this

“renovated cartography” also subverts the structure of the canonical omnipotent map and contributes to explore the impact of urban places upon human behaviors.

Sadler claims that “the power of psychogeography . . . lay precisely in its intoxicating combination of subjective and objective . . . approaches to urban exploration” (The Situationist City 81). There are many emotional zones in the city that cannot be determined simply by architectural or economic conditions.

Debord claims that “[t]he sudden change of ambience in the street within the space of

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a few meters; the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic

atmospheres” are neglected (Situationist International Anthology 6). The results of such ambiences “form the basis of a new cartography characterized by a complete disregard for the traditional and habitual practices of the tourist” (Psychogeography 90). These zones are emphasized as unities of ambiences that are constituent parts of psychogeographical maps. However, there are no directed routes to connect them and no indication of the distances between them. These fragments and the gaps between them replace the totality and coherence of a canonical map. Sadler points out that “the unities of ambience were constituted by many things, especially the ‘soft’, mutable elements of the city scene; the play of presence and absence, of light and sound, of human activity, even of time, and the association of ideas” (70). They are more about psychology, sensations, social relations, and history. Moreover, psychogeography does not discover unities of ambiences as fixed, geographical phenomena which exist in a spatial context, but it constructs them with “soft and mutable elements” that interacts with space. According to McDonough’s explanation of ambiences, he thinks that in Debord’s psychogeographical maps, “space does not simply reflect social relations; it is constitutive of and is constituted by them” (252). “Rather than a container suitable for description, space becomes part of a process: the process of

‘inhabiting’ enacted by social groups” (252). Therefore, psychogeography denies space as just context but unites it to social practice and reveals its relationship and interaction with human activities.