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…from the start, psychogeography was bound up with the creation of situations and the concept of situations was expanded, in time, to cover not just the city, but the whole of society, the totality of possibilities open in an unalienated community.This paper started its life back in 2000 in a course taught by USC Art History professors Richard Meyer and Nancy Troy. wandering in subterranean catacombs forbidden to the public, etc.’ Here we see the dérive as a kind of dream journey, even an invitation to break taboos-or, perhaps, simply to enjoy what we might think of, in the architectural register, as the Gothick picturesque. He also reveals a taste for straying in uncanny locations-‘slipping by night into houses due for demolition.
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This was called the technique of the ‘possible rendezvous’. Debord even suggests that the subject of a dérive might be invited to visit a particular place at a particular time, with the expectation of meeting an unknown person, thus being forced to introduce themself to random passers-by in an effort to identify whether this was the person he or she was looking for. (One Situationist demand was for the abolition of private cars and their replacement by fleets of low-cost taxis.) As in Breton’s book, the dérive also implied the possibility of chance encounters, meetings with strangers. Taxis could be used for rapid transport outside one’s usual environment. Probably a coincidence.)Ī dérive could take place over a few minutes or even a few days. (This text, interestingly enough, was written just as John Cage was conducting his seminars on chance procedures at the School for Social Research in New York. Psychogeography would make possible the creation of maps in which particular locations or regions had already been designated as favouring the arousal of one kind of affective or aesthetic response, so that a certain amount of pre-planning could take place. Debord notes that this technique of dérive is, in a way, only necessary because his larger project of ‘psychogeography’ has not yet been sufficiently far developed.
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MEMOIRES GUY DEBORD SERIES
The recourse to chance reminds us, unavoidably, of André Breton’s doctrine of ‘objective chance’ and above all of his great book, Nadja, which traces a series of just such aimless journeys through Paris, punctuated by a pattern of attraction and repulsion to certain buildings, or kinds of buildings, rather than others. Shocked by this rigid repetition of a fixed pattern of mobility, Debord conceived dérive as a way of creating completely new, unpredictable itineraries, dependent on chance and the spontaneous subjective impulses and reactions of the wanderer. He was especially struck by a map detailing all the movements made over a year by a student living in the 16th Arrondissement: ‘her itinerary delineates a small triangle, with no deviations, the three apexes of which are the School of Political Science, her residence and that of her piano teacher.’ Debord seems to have been inspired in part by Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe’s study of Paris et l’agglomération parisienne, published in 1952 and particularly by its maps, which are frequently used as illustrations in the Situationist journal and in Debord’s own art works. It requires a ‘letting go’ of ‘the usual motives for movement and action’-we might almost say, a letting go of everyday identity. Debord’s basic idea is that this project of wandering through the city should be determined not by any preconceived plan, but by the attractions or discouraging counter-attractions of the city itself. Note, again, the taste for transience and spontaneity. He defines it as ‘a technique of transient passage through varied ambiences’. “ Guy Debord wrote the classic text on the ‘Theory of the Dérive’-usually translated as ‘drift’ or ‘drifting’-in December 1958, in the second number of Internationale Situationniste. From Memoires by Guy Debord & Asgar Jorn 1959