Today’s Plan:
- Derive
- Homework / Friday’s Class
Guy DeBord and the Dérive
Today we are going to do something different. I want to stress before we begin: a Kalman isn’t necessarily a dérive. But its not not a dérive. And the Kalman, to the extent that it involves an empty brain and the welcome of suprise, shares elements with a dérive. Again, I’ve shifted gears in this course from thinking about video as a communication technology to thinking how video, as a communication technology, might (re)shape the ways we communicate, what we communicate, and how we traverse the world and exist with others.
The “dérive” is a method/practice/experiment developed by Situationalist Internationale thinker Guy Debord (1931-1994), a philosopher a filmmaker most known for his film Society of the Spectacle. He introduces the derivé in his 1958 essay “The Theory of the Dérive”:
One of the basic situationist practices is the dérive,(1) a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences. Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.
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. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that 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 narrow social space to which it limits itself, provides psychogeography with abundant data.
Psychogeography grows out of existentialist and phenomenological philosophies developing across the 20th century: these philosophies place attention on how human consciousness receives the world. Often these philosophies attend to the ways that mood colors how we traverse the world–this Heideggerian resonance rings in Debord’s reference to psychogeography. The dérive (which translates as “drift/ing”) attunes itself to the poetic resonance of geographical Being(s), rather than to their more mundane material/technological existence. In other words, pscyhogeography traces how the world feels, how it pushes us in certain directions and away from others. In this, it shares much with critical traditions that push us to see what animates/shapes/manipulates our everyday experience of reality (follow the white rabbit, follow the flows of power, follow the manipulation of capital, follow the unconscious desire, etc etc).
Debord encourages us to drift through the world in different, intentional ways. Instead of following established geographic paths, walking the routes you are “ordered” to follow, the dérive explores alternative routes, based on moods, feelings, paths that might otherwise go ignored.
Let’s examine DeBord’s comments on methodology:
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 level of awareness, since cross-checking these different groups’ impressions makes it possible to arrive at more 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 starting and ending times 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.
You don’t have a day. Rather, you have 15 minutes. Sorry. Working in groups of 2, I’ll ask you to explore outside Candeleria. Wander off the beaten path. Attempt, as much as possible, to practice Debord’s methodology. Attempt to feel what you might follow. Let your other senses direct your direction. Record less what you see and more what you experience. Let, as Debord advocates, chance be your guide.
Take pictures of what you see, what directs and influences your journey. Talk with your partner. Or don’t. Exist and move with what a phenomenologist would call increased intentionality.
Homework
Due Sunday at midnight: the Kalman prospectus. Here’s a link to the template.
I’m planning on doing extended office hours on Friday–from 11:00am to 2:30pm. Feel free to pop in if you want to talk about a potential project idea.
