We are doubtless about to witness a complete upheaval of the established fashions in casual strolling and prostitution. Louis Aragon1
Dérive was a continuous flow in which protagonists embarked upon a Surrealist trip, a dreamy trek through varied Parisian passageways, forever on foot, wandering for hours, usually at night, identifying subtle moods and nuances of neighbourhoods […] Through these real and imagined perambulations, Situationists became latter-day flâneurs, aimless urban strollers who weren’t quite so aimless. Andy Merrifield2
In his book Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice, Francesco Careri identifies the period of transition from Dada to Surrealism (1921–1924) as the first of ‘three important moments of passage in art history […] in which an experience linked to walking represented a turning point’; the second is the emergence of the Situationist Movement from the Letterist International (1956–1957); and the third, the movement from Minimal Art to Land Art (1966–1967).3 According to Careri, the link between walking and art is such that ‘for the entire first part of the 20th century’, walking was experienced as ‘a form of anti-art.’4 For having rejected the hitherto constrained and circumscribed nature of art, the act of walking was propelled into the realm of aesthetic practice, in an, admittedly unsuccessful, attempt to reclaim urban space. This process, by which an everyday action was transformed into an experimental one, was inaugurated (and, for the Dadaists at least, largely concluded) in a single event on a single day: 14 April 1921. For it was on this date, in Paris, at three in the afternoon, in the rain, that eleven individuals, amongst them André Breton, Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault, conducted a ‘lay pilgrimage’ to the church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre. This was the Dada Movement and their meeting was planned as the first in a series of urban excursions to the ‘banal places’ of the city, a serious aesthetic undertaking supported by press releases, photographs, numerous proclamations, and the following flyer, outlining their aims:
The Dadaists passing through Paris, as a remedy for the incompetence of guides and dubious pedants, have decided to undertake a series of visits to selected places, in particular to those places that do not truly have any reason to exist. It is incorrect to insist upon the picturesque, historical interest and sentimental value. The game has not yet been lost, but we must act quickly. Participation in this first visit means answering for human progress, for possible destructions and responding to the need to pursue our action, which you will attempt to encourage by any means possible.5
Upgrading the role of the flâneur from disinterested observer to participant in an aesthetic experiment, the Dadaists hoped to attribute a symbolism to the act of walking which would transfer artistic value away from the realm of objects, towards space and performance. Rather than merely drawing attention to the city that surrounded them, the Dadaists hoped to actively encourage its habitation, in the process transforming the perception of those overlooked quarters of the city, of which Saint Julien was emblematic. These were bold plans outlining a new vision for the city, but in the event expectations rather outstripped reality, as the assembled crowd of fifty or so journalists and spectators were subjected to a dismal series of performances, the highlight of which was a random recitation of words from the Larousse dictionary. ‘After an hour and a half’, writes Mark Polizzotti, ‘the already thinning crowd, soaked by the rain and bored by the speeches, went home. The Dadaists themselves repaired to a nearby café to take stock. The bottom line: they had bombed.’6
Unsurprisingly, given the calamitous nature of the event, the Dadaists chose not to repeat the experience of April 14, which remains the sole example of their planned series of excursions. In a more charitable interpretation of the event and its aftermath, Francesco Careri argues that ‘the work lies in having thought of the action to perform, rather than in the action itself’, adding that ‘the project was not taken to its conclusion because it was already finished. Having performed the action in that particular place was the equivalent of having performed it on the entire city.’7 This troubling gap between thought and action, plan and performance, was to remain, however, and three years later, with the Dadaists now having merged with the Surrealists, another such excursion was to end in farce: on this occasion, in May 1924, André Breton, Louis Aragon, Max Morise and Roger Vitrac, decided to leave Paris for a more prolonged stroll through the countryside. By this time, the Dadaist search for the banal had given way to the Surrealist belief in chance, as Breton’s biographer, Mark Polizzotti, once again describes:
The four men caught a train to Blois, a town they had picked at random on the map, then set off haphazardly on foot; their only planned detours would be for eating and sleeping. Their goal was an absence of goals, an attempt to transpose the chance findings of psychic automation onto the open road […] During rest stops they composed automatic texts, many of which contained reflections of their momentary surroundings. But for the most part, they wandered aimlessly throughout the French countryside, conversing all the while, resolutely following their lack of itinerary.8
As before, the idea seemed plausible, but almost from the start the random element of the stroll and the absence of any fixed goal proved to have a detrimental effect on Breton’s sanity. Bedevilled by ‘increasingly numerous and disturbing phantoms’, matters reached crisis point in the bathroom of a small inn where Breton suddenly noticed an enormous white cockroach crawling towards him: ‘Now everyone knows there’s no such thing as a white cockroach!’, exclaimed Breton, before fleeing the bathroom in panic.9 Shortly afterwards a fight broke out between Aragon and Vitrac, the former having grown increasingly exasperated by Vitrac’s ‘insistence on seeing every minor coincidence as a major revelation.’ Walking without direction or purpose had, in this instance at least, resulted in mental disturbance and violence. Ten days after having set out, Breton put an end to the debacle and the four Surrealists returned to Paris by train.10
Despite, or perhaps because of, its unexpected results, the practical value of this trip was by no means dismissed by Breton, who was to describe it as a ‘quartet deambulation’, or an example of automatic writing in real space, in which the act of walking was directly imprinted upon the map of a mental territory.11 Deambulation, the Surrealist term for this ‘automatic’ form of walking, has been defined as ‘the achievement of a state of hypnosis by walking, a disorientating loss of control. It is a medium through which to enter into contact with the unconscious part of the territory.’12 The characteristic ‘loss of control’ is certainly evident in the description of the walk above, albeit not quite in the manner that Breton might have hoped for, and just as the excursions planned by the Dadaists were never completed, so too was this rural foray never to be repeated. Deambulation, however, was to remain a much practised element of Surrealist activity in Paris itself, where the city’s outskirts were the site for what the Surrealist poet, Jacques Baron, was later to describe, with questionable enthusiasm, as an ‘interminable stroll.’13
Later in 1924 Breton was to publish his first Manifesto of Surrealism in which he was to define the term for the first time, proclaiming: ‘I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.’14 But the Surrealist contribution to the literature of walking is not to be found here, nor does it rest upon the hapless adventures of its principal adherents outlined above. Instead, the concept of random or automatic walking first espoused by Breton, and the search for the banal places of the city described by their Dadaist forbears, find its most eloquent expression in a trio of ‘novels’ published in the late 1920s, all of which take Paris as their subject. André Breton, Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault first met in 1918 and soon after they were to launch the review, Littérature; but it was later in the following decade that Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (Paris Peasant, 1926), Breton’s Nadja (1928) and Soupault’s Les Dernières Nuits de Paris (The Last Nights of Paris, 1928) were published, providing us with an extraordinary triptych of pre-war Parisian street life, structured around the series of walks which they describe.
Unlike Nadja and The Last Nights of Paris, both of which are principally dictated by sexual desire and the search for the ‘eternal female’, Aragon’s Paris Peasant is largely polemic in tone, displaying a hostility against what he sees as an attack on the very fabric of the city. Paris Peasant outlines two walks undertaken in Paris between 1924 and 1926, in which Aragon, while acknowledging the erotic aspects of the street (and describing the customary visit to a brothel), also bears witness to a city disappearing before his eyes:
The covered arcades which abound in Paris in the vicinity of the main boulevards and which are rather disturbingly named passages, as though no one had the right to linger for more than an instant in these sunless corridors […] The great American passion for city planning […] now being applied to the task of redrawing the map of our capital in straight lines, will soon spell the doom of these human aquariums.15
In fact, the ‘human aquarium’ which was to be the principal focus of Aragon’s attention, the Passage de l’Opéra, was already under threat of destruction when he began writing the book, and by the time it was published it had been destroyed.16 As Aragon walks through the Passage de l’Opéra and later takes a night-time stroll through the park at Buttes-Chaumont (accompanied by André Breton and Marcel Noll), his meanderings reveal what he describes as ‘a charming multiplicity of appearances and provocations […] a mobile human tapestry, continually fraying, continually being repaired.’17 Neither purely experimental in form, nor straightforwardly a documentary account of his experiences, Paris Peasant remains an unclassifiable work whose attempts to directly transpose the ‘surreality’ of everyday life on to paper is never wholly convincing.18 Indeed, Aragon’s ‘novel’ reads less like an example of avant-garde experimentalism and more as an ethnographical account of Parisian street life, an attempt to document what one critic has described as the ‘mythology’ of a society through an analysis of its behaviour and customs.19 In this respect, Aragon’s text may be seen as a precursor to the work of Walter Benjamin, and it was in fact Paris Peasant that first drew Benjamin’s attention to the significance of the arcades and to the role of walking as a cultural act, leading him to comment on the impact of Aragon’s book: ‘Each evening in bed I could not read more than a few words of it before my heartbeat got so strong I had to put the book down.’20 Paris Peasant is unlikely to provoke quite the same reaction in the contemporary reader, although with its digressive style and its preoccupation with the overlooked and neglected aspects of the city, Aragon’s book does bear a strong resemblance to many of today’s psychogeographical accounts of urban life.
Looking back on his friendship with Aragon some twenty years later, André Breton was to write: “I still recall the extraordinary role that Aragon played in our daily strolls through Paris. The localities that we passed through in his company, even the most colourless ones, were positively transformed by a spellbinding romantic inventiveness that never faltered and that needed only a street-turning or a shop-window to inspire a fresh outpouring.”21 Of course, Breton’s comments can be applied equally to his own work, and not least to Nadja, his attempt to transcribe the Surrealist ethos to the novel. ‘Nothing is imagined in Nadja’, writes Maurice Nadeau, ‘everything is utterly, rigorously true.’22 Yet within the works of Breton and his contemporaries nothing is as it seems, and Breton’s biographer Mark Polizzotti has claimed the opposite, noting that ‘the first thing is, this is not a novel. The second: it’s not strictly factual, either.’23 Truth or fiction, Nadja, more than any other Surrealist text, foregrounds the city street as the site of the uncanny, the coincidental and the unexpected. It is here that Breton outlines the freedom to be gained by following one’s feet wherever they might lead you, the random stroll acting as the catalyst, transforming the mundane and the everyday into the marvellous:
Meanwhile, you can be sure of meeting me in Paris, of not spending more than three days without seeing me pass, toward the end of the afternoon, along the Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle between the Matin printing office and the Boulevard de Strasbourg. I don’t know why it should be precisely here that my feet take me, here that I almost invariably go without specific purpose, without anything to induce me but this obscure clue: namely that it (?) will happen here. I cannot see, as I hurry along, what could constitute for me, even without my knowing it, a magnetic pole in either space or time.24
It was as the result of one such stroll on an October afternoon, ‘one of those idle, gloomy afternoons I know so well how to spend’, that Breton had exactly the type of chance encounter that the Surrealist stroll was supposed to facilitate: ‘She carried her head high, unlike everyone else on the sidewalk. And she looked so delicate she scarcely seemed to touch the ground as she walked. A faint smile may have been wandering across her face.’25 Nadja, the mysterious heroine of Breton’s book, was inspired by one of the writer’s actual lovers, who, in true surrealist fashion, ended her days in an asylum. Written in the misleadingly objective tone of a medical case-study, Nadja is a surrealist romance filled with those correspondences, coincidences and uncanny juxtapositions that characterised the movement, and Breton’s account is dominated by the spontaneous and unexpected, reflecting an outlook in which chance governs all. As we follow Breton and Nadja through Paris, on foot, it becomes clear that the act of walking has become the central metaphor of the text. For Nadja is encoded in the language of walking, idling, and wandering; movement is meaning and the journey is what supplies both a form to the text and a structure to the lives of its protagonists. ‘If you desired it,’ says Nadja to Breton, ‘I would be nothing, or merely a footprint.’26 And as Nadja sleepwalks through the text like a ghost haunting the streets, it is only the record of her movement, the trace of her footsteps, that gives her identity any substance. She has become symbolic of Paris itself, and it is only as long as she continues to move through the street – ‘the only region of valid experience for her’ – that she can be said to exist at all.27
Published in the same year as Nadja, and as a consequence somewhat overshadowed by it, Philippe Soupault’s The Last Nights of Paris has much in common with Breton’s work, also detailing a series of randomly motivated strolls through Paris, in search of an equally elusive quarry. Like Nadja, Soupault’s heroine, Georgette, is also the subject of a series of involuntary meetings and occult episodes as she is pursued through the Parisian night; and just as Nadja comes to symbolise the city, so too does Georgette, transforming herself and her surroundings as she passes through them:
Georgette resumed her stroll about Paris, through the mazes of the night. She went on, dispelling sorrow, solitude or tribulation. Then more than ever did she display her strange power: that of transfiguring the night. Thanks to her, who was no more than one of the hundred thousands, the Parisian night became a mysterious domain, a great and marvellous country […] That night, as we were pursuing or, more exactly, tracking Georgette, I saw Paris for the first time. It was surely not the same city […] As I looked at it, it contracted. And Georgette herself became a city.28
‘I know, we know’, writes Soupault, ‘that in Paris death alone has power to quench that pointless thirst, to bring to a close an aimless walk.’29 For Soupault, as for Breton and Aragon before him, walking had become a way of life, an instinctive reflex which cannot be restrained.
The Surrealist movement promised much in its numerous Manifestoes; but reality was to prove stubbornly mundane, while the realm of divine enchantment was to remain tantalisingly out of reach. Automatism turned out to provide distinctly uninspired results, and as far as walking was concerned, a lot of legwork was expended with little obvious result. The surrealist engagement with communism had a rather desultory effect on those members more used to the spirit of playful abandon from which the movement had arisen, and in a foretaste of the problems that were to beset Guy Debord a generation later, Breton managed to alienate almost all his former allies as Surrealism collapsed under the weight of personal vendetta and infighting. Paris Peasant, however, remains, alongside Nadja and The Last Nights of Paris, as a memorial to a way of life under threat. For as the ill-fated dalliance with communism was to demonstrate, the day of the apolitical and dispassionate stroller was at an end. What surrealism in general, and these books in particular, were to emphasise is the fact that the idle stroller can no longer stand at the wayside or retreat to his armchair, but must now face up to the destruction of his city. In the aftermath of the war, the streets were radicalised as never before and revolutionary change was in the air. If the urban wanderer was to continue his aimless strolling then the very act of walking had to become subversive, a means of reclaiming the streets for the pedestrian.
By the end of the Second World War the Surrealist movement was effectively over and the publication of Maurice Nadeau’s History of Surrealism (1944) was to provide its epitaph. The tension between aesthetic and political impulses within the movement had inevitably resulted in splits and counter-movements, and it was as a response to a perceived lack of political radicalism that many of the avant-garde collectives of post-war Europe were formed. Movements as diverse and ephemeral as Cobra, the Lettrist International and the Imaginist Bauhaus formed a new avant-garde fuelled by new revolutionary sentiments; but they were hampered both by a lack of direction and, more crucially, members.30 Acknowledging their debt to the playful subversion of Dada and Surrealism, these movements continued to proclaim the need for a new society, free from the homogenising effects of capitalist development; but it was only with the emergence of the Situationist International in 1957, under the firm, if not tyrannical, grip of Guy Debord that a momentum for change began to appear. Debord, however, like Breton before him, was soon to display exactly those dictatorial tendencies that had reduced the Surrealists to an exhausting round of infighting and expulsions, and in a similar vein, he was equally disinclined to acknowledge the clear debt the Situationists owed, both to Surrealism and to earlier traditions of urban exploration.
The term with which Debord has become most closely associated and which has since come wholly to dominate any discussion of walking as an aesthetic or political practice finds its first, and oft-repeated, definition in his ‘Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography’, written in September 1955 and later published in the Belgian journal Les Lèvres Nues:
The word psychogeography, suggested by an illiterate Kabyle as a general term for the phenomena a few of us were investigating around the summer of 1953, is not too inappropriate. It does not contradict the materialist perspective of the conditioning of life and thought by objective nature. Geography, for example, deals with the determinant action of general natural forces, such as soil composition or climatic conditions, on the 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 behaviour of individuals. The adjective psychogeographical, retaining a rather pleasing vagueness, can thus be applied to the findings arrived at by this type of investigation, to their influence on human feelings, and even more generally to any situation or conduct that seems to reflect the same spirit of discovery.31
Of course, it is precisely this ‘pleasing vagueness’ which has since allowed so many writers to identify themselves and their work with this movement. Psychogeography becomes for Debord the point where psychology and geography intersect. Gone are the romantic notions of an artistic practice; here we have an experiment to be conducted under scientific conditions and whose results are to be rigorously analysed. The emotional and behavioural impact of urban space upon individual consciousness is to be carefully monitored and recorded; its results are to be used to promote the construction of a new urban environment that both reflects and facilitates the desires of its inhabitants; and its transformation is to be conducted by those people skilled in psychogeographical techniques. The principal tool at the psychogeographer’s disposal, claims Debord, is the aimless drift, or dérive, which enables its practitioner to ascertain the true nature of the urban environment as he passes through it. Hence, emotional zones that cannot be determined simply by architectural or economic conditions must be revealed by the dérive; the results of which may then form the basis of a new cartography characterised by a complete disregard for the traditional and habitual practices of the tourist:
The production of psychogeographical maps, or even the introduction of alterations such as more or less arbitrarily transposing maps of two different regions, can contribute to clarifying certain wanderings that express not subordination to randomness but complete insubordination to habitual influences […] A friend recently told me that he had just wandered through the Harz region of Germany while blindly following the directions of a map of London. This sort of game is obviously only a mediocre beginning in comparison to the complete construction of architecture and urbanism that will someday be within the power of everyone.32
Written in 1956, but first published in the Internationale Situationniste #2 in December 1958, Guy Debord’s ‘Theory of the Dérive’ describes ‘a technique of transient passage through varied ambiances’, involving ‘playful-constructive behaviour and awareness of psychogeographical effects; which completely distinguishes it from the classical notions of the journey and the stroll.’33 Of course, this statement is a highly contentious one, for it seems hard to think of the dérive in terms other than of those strolls undertaken by the Surrealists a generation earlier. Yet, on closer inspection, although both appear to involve an element of chance and lack a pre-ordained direction, the dérive does not demonstrate the pure submission to unconscious desire that characterised the surrealist wanderings or the journeys of the strolling flâneur.34 For although the dérive may lack a clear destination, it is not without purpose; on the contrary, the dériveur is conducting a psychogeographical investigation and is expected to return home having noted the ways in which the areas traversed resonate with particular moods and ambiences. In fact, it has been claimed that far from being the aimless, empty-headed drifting of the casual stroller, Debord’s principle is nearer to a military strategy and has its roots, not in earlier avant-garde experimentation, but in military tactics, where drifting is defined as ‘a calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus.’ In this light, the dérive becomes a strategic device for reconnoitring the city, ‘a reconnaissance for the day when the city would be seized for real.’35 In short, the dérive takes the wanderer out of the realm of the disinterested spectator and places him in a subversive position as a revolutionary following a political agenda; the dériveur is a foot soldier in a Situationist militia, an advance guard sent out to observe enemy territory.
Debord balances his theoretical concerns with more practical information, suggesting that the dérive should be conducted in small groups of two or three people and noting that its average duration is a single day, although acknowledging that one sequence of dérives lasted for around two months. Indeed, as Ralph Rumney was later to admit, for some the dérive could become the work of a lifetime:
I began to understand what it was through Debord, not so much because he talked about it, but because he practised it. And ever since I have never, or hardly ever, done anything else. My whole life became a dérive. I was gripped, fascinated by the idea […] In Paris we wandered from café to café – we went where our feet and our inclinations carried us. We had to make do with very little money. I still wonder how we managed. We did dérives in Paris in an extremely limited zone. We discovered routes to go from one place to another that were more like detours […] You discover certain places in a city that you start to appreciate, because you are welcomed in a bar or because suddenly you feel better […] if you set off on a dérive in a good state of mind, you’ll end up finding a good place. Yes, that’s what it is, and I’d even say if you put me in an unknown town I will find the place where I should be.36
Storms and other types of precipitation, continues Debord, are apparently favourable, but prolonged rains can render such activities almost impossible; the use of taxis is not forbidden but can alter the nature of the dérive. In conclusion, Debord writes: ‘The lessons drawn from the dérive permit the drawing up of the first surveys of the psychogeographical articulations of the modern city. Beyond the discovery of unities of ambiance, of their main components and their spatial localization, one comes to perceive their principal axes of passage, their exits and their defences. One arrives at the central hypothesis of the existence of psychogeographical pivotal points.’37
So, the stage has been set. Debord has provided us with our theoretical underpinning as well as furnishing us with practical advice. It is 1958, Paris is ripe for revolutionary change and, armed with the dérive, we are sent into the field. It is at this point, however, that one cannot help but notice that while the theoretical and instructive elements of psychogeography are manifest, the actual results of all these experiments are strangely absent. Trawling through the extensive literature on psychogeography and situationism, one is hard pressed to find any concrete examples of the results of such psychogeographical activity. ‘Perhaps not surprisingly’, one commentator has observed, ‘the Situationists didn’t do much in the way of travel – they were too busy talking, fighting, writing manifestos and being expelled to get much travelling done.’38
By 1962, the Situationist movement had split, as tensions between artistic and political priorities resurfaced once again. The Second Situationist International was now separated from the Specto-Situationist International, the latter group, under Debord and Vaneigem, now free to pursue an increasingly overt political agenda; and thanks to the translation of their works into English, situationism is today much better known for its emphasis on revolutionary politics than it is for its cultural component. Considered solely on its merits as a practical tool at the vanguard of a revolutionary movement, psychogeography must be considered an abject failure. For the meagre results of prolonged theorising reveal such a paucity of useful material that it is barely surprising that psychogeography fell from favour. In this respect, as in so many others, the fate of psychogeography resembles that of Surrealist automatism, where a prominent theoretical position at the outset was quickly followed by a realisation of its obvious limitations and its quiet demotion.
Looking back upon his former friendship with Debord (a period culminating in his inevitable expulsion from the Situationist movement), Scottish beat writer, pornographer and junkie Alexander Trocchi was to write: ‘I remember long, wonderful psychogeographical walks in London with Guy […] he took me to places in London I didn’t know, that he didn’t know, that he sensed that I’d never have been to if it hadn’t been with him. He was a man who could discover a city.’39 This search for De Quincey’s ‘Northwest Passage’, a metaphor for that concealed entrance to the magical realm which had been at the forefront of early Situationist ideas, was soon to be forgotten, however, as Debord became increasingly preoccupied with a Marxist revisionism that had little time for the unfettered romanticism that Trocchi had so fondly recalled. But ultimately Debord came to recognise the essentially personal nature of the relationship between the individual and the city, sensing that this subjective realm was always going to remain at odds with the objective mechanisms of the psychogeographical methodology that sought to expose it: ‘The secrets of the city are, at a certain level, decipherable,’ he wrote, ‘but the personal meaning they have for us is incommunicable.’40
Resisting the subjective and mysterious currents that the dérive promoted, Debord became increasingly dogmatic in his insistence upon a rigorous examination of the spectacular society – a society whose seductive surface belied the repressive realities of capitalist consumption. Debord’s Society of the Spectacle was published in 1967 and its allusive and often ambiguous series of apercus proved tailor-made in providing the slogans that would adorn Paris during the uprising the following year. Debord’s iconic work may not mention psychogeography by name yet, in its depiction of the ways in which the essential emptiness of modern life is obscured behind an elaborate and spectacular array of commodities, Debord has much to say to the urban wanderer. For amidst our immersion in this world of rampant consumerism and regimented monotony, street life has been suppressed, and the hostility towards the pedestrian that drove the flâneur from the streets of nineteenth-century Paris continues unabated today. The urban wanderer has been subordinated to the ‘dictatorship of the automobile’ as a new urban landscape emerges, a non-place dominated by technology and advertising whose endless reflective surfaces are devoid of individuality.41 This is the future which Debord had attempted to avert.
In his biography of Debord, Andy Merrifield positions his subject outside the tradition of his avant-garde predecessors, Baudelaire, Benjamin and Breton; and instead, in emphasising his political agenda, he places Debord and his comrades from the 1968 uprising alongside their revolutionary forbears from 1848. Indeed, in his search for what he regards as Debord’s true antecedents, he travels even further back through France’s revolutionary past, for it is not the figure of the flâneur who is invoked here, but instead his more militant ancestor, the frondeur:
Debord idolized Retz [Cardinal de Retz, Jean François Paul de Gondi], the master of deception, the folk hero and trusted patron of Paris’s poor and dangerous classes, who between 1648 and 1652 helped incite the street protests against Louis XIV, revolts that became known as ‘The Fronde’. Retz welcomed the name frondeur, a term originally applied to rampaging gangs of street ruffians who brandished slings (frondes) and ran riot across medieval France. Seventeenth-century frondeurs took pride in wearing this once pejorative appellation; Retz and his coterie of aristocratic dissidents appropriated it in their risky revolt. Debord was a particularly distant cousin of Retz, as it were, many times removed; he was the cardinal’s twentieth-century alter ego […] both men would lead, in exile, a fugitive and vagabond existence. Together they’d become aesthetes of subversion and Debord the frondeur of our spectacular age.42
If, then, Debord is to be viewed within a politically more radical tradition than many, if not all, of his counterparts in this account, his role within the admittedly less militant (and more pedestrian) tradition of the walker remains less clear. Yet Merrifield helps us to clarify this position by identifying Debord as a ‘passive adventurer’ who, despite his very active role in the politics of his day, has paved the way for an equally radical assault upon the ‘urban unconscious’:
Passive adventurers […] are more sensitive explorers, more cerebral, more studious and solitary, reading a lot and dreaming often. Passive adventuring […] is an art form, ‘a question of intellectual gymnastics, understanding everyday exercises and practising the methodology of the imagination’ […] Voyages here are more commonplace, more carefully chosen: cities and cabarets, burlesque and books, wine and song, love and hate, intimacy and death […] studying Debord’s life and following his trail, one could justifiably wonder: what kind of adventurer was Guy Debord? In a way, it’s obvious, but only now can we state it: he was a pre-eminent passive adventurer […] Debord’s life was an active voyage of discovery – engaging in covert activities here, disturbing the peace there; and yet, for all that, his enduring legacy is perhaps how he tapped the mysteries of the urban unconscious, unearthed the sentimental city, opening up its everyday heights and illuminated its nocturnal depths.43
In this light, Debord and the Situationists may be judged finally as unable to wholly divorce themselves from their avant-garde heritage; for just as Debord must be seen within a revolutionary context, so too must he and the Situationists be regarded within the more playful and experimental tradition of urban wandering. Furthermore, by characterising Debord as a voyager in the urban unconscious, Merrifield recalls the visionary tradition of Blake and De Quincey. Of course, the Situationists’ moment came and passed and the ultimate failure of 1968 was to be followed by the movement’s dissolution in 1972. Yet it was during this brief passage of time in Paris that flâneur and frondeur were to meet for the first, and to date, only time, a meeting which was to inspire a new and more politically active role for the next generation of urban walkers.
1 Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant, trans. by Simon Watson-Taylor, London: Jonathan Cape, 1971, p. 29
2 Andy Merrifield, Guy Debord, London: Reaktion, 2005, pp. 30–31
3 Careri, p. 21. While this chapter is concerned with the first and second ‘passages’ in Careri’s schema, the third and final of these, that which accounts for the emergence of Land Art, lies beyond the scope of this book. However, those looking for a discussion of this movement and its principal practitioners, amongst them Richard Long, Hamish Fulton and Robert Smithson, should read Careri’s account (pp. 119–175) or visit the Walkart blog at http://walkart.wordpress.com/
4 Careri, p. 21
5 Careri, p. 75
6 Mark Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton, London: Bloomsbury, 1995, p. 153
7 Careri, p. 78
8 Polizzotti, pp. 201–2
9 Polizzotti, p. 202
10 Polizzotti, p. 202
11 Careri, p. 79
12 Careri, p. 82. ‘The Surrealists,’ writes Careri, ‘believed that urban space could be crossed like our mind, that a non-visible reality can reveal itself in the city […] Surrealism, perhaps without yet fully understanding its importance as an aesthetic form, utilised walking – the most natural and everyday act of man – as a means by which to investigate and unveil the unconscious of the city, those parts that elude planned control and constitute the unexpressed, untranslatable component in traditional representations.’ Careri, pp. 87–8
13 Careri, p. 83
14 André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. by Richard Seaver & Helen Lane, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, 1972, p. 14
15 Aragon, p. 28
16 Michael Sheringham, Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 75
17 Aragon, p. 50
18 The historian of Surrealism, Maurice Nadeau, writes: ‘Something of a problem presents itself in the form of books like Nadja and Paysan de Paris. Both are direct personal accounts of a short period spent in pursuit of “surreality”, plus lengthy reflections on the very meagre events reported. Their frankness and the occasional power of the prose make up for the desultory form and the unblinking egoism of every page. But they fall about halfway between purely experimental writing and exposition.’ Maurice Nadeau, The History of Surrealism, trans. by Richard Howard, London: Jonathan Cape, 1968, p. 27
19 Michael Sheringham describes the narrator of Paris Peasant as adopting ‘the guise of an ethnographer seeking to piece together the mythology of a society on the basis of close scrutiny of its material culture, and participatory observation in its rituals (notably in the sphere of consumption: eating, drinking, sex, and shopping).’ Sheringham, p. 75
20 Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991, p. 33
21 Simon Watson-Taylor, ed., Aragon, Paris Peasant, Introduction, p. 9
22 Nadeau, p. 151
23 Mark Polizzotti, ed., André Breton, Nadja, trans. by Richard Howard, London: Penguin, 1999, Introduction, p. ix
24 Breton, Nadja, p. 32
25 Breton, Nadja, pp. 63–4
26 Breton, Nadja, p. 116
27 Breton, Nadja, p. 113
28 Philippe Soupault, The Last Nights of Paris, trans. by William Carlos Williams, New York: Full Court Press, 1982, pp. 73–4
29 Soupault, p. 41
30 The Lettrist International (1952–7), itself the product of the earlier Lettrist Group (1948), and a forerunner to The Situationist International (1957–72), was to identify the act of walking as a means of challenging the status quo: ‘The practice of walking in a group, lending attention to unexpected stimuli, passing entire nights bar-hopping, discussing, dreaming of a revolution that seemed imminent, became a form of rejection of the system for the Lettrists: a means of escaping from bourgeois life and rejecting the rules of the art system.’ See Careri, p. 92. Those seeking a detailed understanding of the short-lived, and often invisible, series of movements and counter movements that characterise the pre-Situationist decade before 1957 should consult Stewart Home’s The Assault on Culture: Utopian Currents from Lettrisme to Class War, Edinburgh: AK Press, 1991
31 Guy Debord, ‘Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography’ (1955), in Ken Knabb, ed., Situationist International Anthology, Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981, p. 5
32 Debord, ‘Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography’, in Knabb, p. 7
33 Debord, ‘Theory of the Dérive’, in Knabb, p. 50
34 Sadie Plant writes: ‘Unlike surrealist automatism, the dérive was not a matter of surrendering to the dictates of an unconscious mind or irrational force […] Nor was everything subordinated to the sovereignty of choice: to dérive was to notice the way in which certain areas, streets, or buildings resonate with states of mind, inclinations, and desires, and to seek out reasons for movement other than those for which the environment was designed. Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age, London: Routledge, 1992, p. 59
35 Simon Sadler, The Situationist City, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982, p. 81
36 Ralph Rumney, The Consul, trans. by Malcolm Imrie, London: Verso, 2002, pp. 65–66. Rumney was the founder member (the only member) of The London Psychogeographical Committee and was present at the formation of the Situationist International in July 1957 at Cosio d’Arroscia in Italy. While Rumney was clearly gripped by the idea of the dérive, he was also openly dismissive of the notion that such a concept was one which originated with the Situationists: ‘Of course, it wasn’t a new discovery’, he writes, ‘it had always existed […] The Letterists gave it a name and a methodology […] At the level of ideas, I don’t think we came up with anything which didn’t already exist.’ Rumney, p. 37
37 Debord, ‘Theory of the Dérive’, in Knabb, p. 53
38 Antony & Henry, eds., Lonely Planet Guide to Experimental Travel, London: Lonely Planet, 2005, p. 22
39 Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: The Secret History of the Twentieth Century, London: Secker & Warburg, 1990, p. 385
40 Sadler, p. 80
41 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. by Ken Knabb, London: Rebel Press, 1992, p. 97
42 Merrifield, pp. 81–2
43 Merrifield, pp. 119–20