created, & modified, =this.modified
rel: Survey of Being Lost
One need not wander the streets forever. The dérive, raised to the level of the concept, can now be practised in almost any kind of time-space whatsoever.
We talk, for instance, of how a river, snow or continents ‘drift’, of ‘getting someone’s drift’, or of ‘drifting apart from someone or something’.
Thought
This comment on a slow drift, or drifting away makes me think of Survey of Being Lost. Lost can be a state but what is the act of getting lost?
In asking yourself what degree are you lost? Can you compare the degree someone is lost with how lost someone else is?
In viewing it like a process I see someone as constantly making slight changes, possibly by chance, that drift them closer to being lost, and closer to being not lost.
With this idea in my head I think of all the things of the earth connected to me, like people or objects I know the location of, and how at this precise moment little tugs on them bring them closer and farther to being lost.
Some of these tugs are by subjects who will find them. Something lost, and something found.
And, then, there are related nouns like ‘driftwood’, or the US term ‘drifter’, a vagrant who refuses the solid bourgeois values of work, family and nation.
Where capital’s political economy is predicated on ‘driven’, entrepreneurial subjects – the ‘cognitariat’ (Berardi Citation) – the drift, by contrast, complicates the intentional rectitude of agency, expressing a tendency to be diverted from one’s immediate task, to let things slide, a predilection to be led astray.
Variations in etymology (English and French) English Drift
c. 1300, literally ‘a being driven’ (of snow, etc.); not recorded in Old English; either a suffixed form of drive (v.) (compare thrift/thrive) or borrowed from Old Norse drift ‘snow drift’, or Middle Dutch drift ‘pasturage, drove, flock’, both from Proto-Germanic *driftiz (source also of Danish and Swedish drift, German Trift), from PIE root *dhreibh- ‘to drive, push’. Sense of ‘what one is getting at’ is from 1520s. Meaning ‘controlled slide of a sports car’ attested by 1955.
French Dériver
divert water (13th cent., job; gramm. fig. etc.), derivation (1377, L.) -atif (15th cent.), from Latin derivare, -atio, -ativus, in a proper and fig. sense (from rivus stream) Undo what is riveted. See river.
Thought
Hmm, some interesting stuff here. Also rivet as in riveting (For I mine eyes will rivet to his Face - “Hamlet”)
Old French rivet “nail, rivet,” from river “to clench, fix, fasten,”
In its original use, the drift is elemental, a process that exposes the body – ‘any body whatever’, to reconfigure a phrase from Deleuze’s work on cinema – to water, entangling it in a universe of chaotic currents and unpredictable speeds.
To drift, then, is not simply to flow without friction like the electronic currents of finance capital or the abstracted transmissions of the barcode that disembody the world; it is to be a part of a sticky universe of staggered movement, syncopated rhythms, fizzes and schisms.
Bourriaud:
One of the essential elements of contemporary art’s political programme is that of bringing the world into a precarious state – in other words, constantly affirming the transitory and circumstantial nature of the institutions that structure social life, the rules governing individual and collective behaviour.
The SI’s dérive has greatly informed the practice of ‘walking as performance’
SI’s original notion of the dérive, the refusal to abandon art altogether. Alienation in 2018 is not the same as alienation in 1955. And no one can deny that the SI’s somewhat crude, if understandable, concern with overcoming passivity – the very cornerstone of their Marxian philosophy –appears outdated at a time when capitalism, refuses to let people rest, and when digital culture insists on the permanent performance of subjectivity.
In a culture of electronic flows, big data and invisible algorithms, and where speed, as Paul Virilio argues (2006), is the privileged condition par excellence, the SI’s commitment to movement needs to be rethought.
Cities have enacted rules, to stem the hollowing out of certain transient neighborhoods (result of tourism etc.)
‘the task is to avoid being an archivist of Situationism … and instead to become a Situationist archivist, or a Situationist in the archive’
Formulary for a New Urbanism on love versus garbage disposal unit.
To counter the banalization of the garbage unit, the SI proposed the drift as an activity deliberately attuned to the affective, bodily play of surfaces, textures and atmospheres. Through this decidedly materialist method of enquiry in which, as in Artaud’s theatre, the city reveals its ‘secrets through the skin’, the SI were part a counter-tradition of French geography – one that was grounded in the minoritarian methods of Communard geographer Élisée Reclus and later developed by Marxist spatial theorist Henri Lefebvre. For both Reclus and Lefebvre, space is a performative, dynamic process whose transformations and relation ought to allow for solidarity, passion and equality – the very opposite of the abstract, separated city produced by capitalist modernity in which space is a mere backdrop against which economic forces can play out.
Psychogeography and Theatergoing are opposites.
psychogeography and theatregoing are polar opposites. Because of its neutrality of space, limitation of movement, and uniformity of environment, theatre seems to be the site of utmost resistance to psychogeography.
Anthropocene
In the Anthropocene, an ironically named era in which human agency is undone by the ‘feedback’ from the earth itself, drifting not only provides an accurate description of our planetary state – the sense in which anthropogenically induced climate change has cut us adrift from a stable, permanent idea of ‘nature’ – but, just as importantly a complex vocabulary able to acknowledge our lack of control and simultaneous need to act.