https://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/89

A tape recording of this talk was presented 17 May 1961 at a conference of the Group for Research on Everyday Life convened by Henri Lefebvre in the Center of Sociological Studies of the CNRS.

To study everyday life would be a completely absurd undertaking, unable even to grasp anything of its object, if this study was not explicitly for the purpose of transforming everyday life.

The lecture, the exposition of certain intellectual considerations to an audience, being an extremely commonplace form of human relations in a rather large sector of society, itself forms a part of the every day life that must be criticized.

Sociologists, for example, are only too inclined to remove from every day life things that happen to them every day, and to transfer them to separate and supposedly superior spheres. In this way habit in all its forms – beginning with the habit of handling a few professional concepts (concepts produced by the division of labor) — masks reality behind privileged conventions.

Thomas McDonough // THE DERIVE AND SITUATIONIST PARIS

In: Andreotti, Libero- Costa, Xavier : SITUATIONISTS- Art, Politics, Urbanism

Museo d’Art Contemporain de Barcelona 1996

In 1957, on the eve of the founding of the Situationist International, Guy Debord produced two unusual maps of Paris. Published with the help of his friend, the Danish painter Asger Jorn, Discours sur les passions de l’amour was an independent, folded map, while The Naked City was included in Jorn’s tract Pour La forme of 1958. Their production coincided with one of the high points of situationist intervention into the spheres of visual culture. Debord and Jorn composed the collage novel Fin de Copenhague in the same year, and the more ambitious Memoires in 1958. Debord’s second film, Sur le passage de quelques personnes a travers une assez courte unite de temps, also dates from this period. Like the maps, these works had something of a retrospective character, summarizing past activities and concerns and assessing their future relevance for the Situationist International.

One of the basic situationist practices is the dérive [literally: “drifting”], a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. 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.