>Psychogeography is an approach to geography that emphasizes playfulness and "drifting" around urban environments. It has links to the Situationist International. Psychogeography was defined in 1955 by Guy Debord as "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals."[1] Another definition is "a whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities... just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape."[2]
>In psychogeography, a dérive (French: [/de.ʁiv/], "drift") is an unplanned journey through a landscape, usually urban, on which the subtle aesthetic contours of the surrounding architecture and geography subconsciously direct the travellers, with the ultimate goal of encountering an entirely new and authentic experience. Situationist theorist Guy Debord defines the dérive as "a mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances."
>Dérives are necessary, according to situationist theory, because of the increasingly predictable and monotonous experience of everyday life in advanced capitalism.[2] The dérive grants a rare instance of pure chance, an opportunity for an utterly new and authentic experience of the different atmospheres and feelings generated by the urban landscape.[2]
do any of you go for dérives? what are your experiences with them?
tl;dr: do you guys ever take walks
>>7463464
well do you?
>>7463454
>increasingly predictable and monotonous experience of everyday life in advanced capitalism
As opposed to?
>>7463469
yes, when i come out of the gym and it's cold out.
>>7463464
I find it weird how the French intellectualize the most banal things like taking walks and wasting time and try to make it into a complex identity, flaneur, or subject, psychogeography.
>>7463524
oh ho ho, most excellent psychoshitposting, monsieur!
>>7463454
Personally I have found that when out and about I can enter into this state-of-mind if I choose to do so but within 30 minutes I inevitably start thinking about what am I doing for the rest of the day and how do I get there etc.
However I have had some very good experiences with taking psychedelics like acid and wandering around cities or public areas with friends. Maybe its cheating but the experience is always interesting and almost perfectly meets the description given for what it should be like.
>>7463474
This.
>>7463524
dude terminology lmao
>>7463730
Explain how modern capitalism is more monotonous then working in a 19th century factory for 16 hours per day.
>>7463742
idiots who don't read are indistinguishable, regardless of having more than one body
>>7463464
this
after i first encountered the idea of psychogeography i started taking unplanned and meandering walks around my town, sometimes into neighboring towns. i doubt these walks do anything to subvert capitalism or whatever, but it's fun getting to see all these obscure little parts of the neighborhood i'd never encountered before, and walking has a very meditative quality for me.
>>7463745
Because the choices and escapades a 19th century worker had (going to less industrial towns, crime, to mention two) have one way or another become co-opted by capitalism.
>>7463912
How does that mak it more monotonous.
Sounds like a shitty Parisian version of what people have longed called "Taking a goddamn hiking trip".
Architecture will never rival the beauty and spiritual qualities of the outdoors. Either way, yes going for walks is good for you. Why do you think its the one activity old people never stop doing.
>>7463454
>attack the spectacle
>by posting on 4chan
Bravo, revolutionary.
>>7464115
Did Debord or any other members of the SI ever come up with ideas on how to demolish the spectacle without creating a seperate one in the process?
uh yeah i walk around and sometimes talk to people
please don't go around bothering normal people with your gay self and ideas because of some french shit you read though
>>7464133
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9tournement
not that this accomplishes anything other than maybe a few laughs
>>7464133
No, because leftists aren't interested in solving problems, just complaining about the laws and markets that permit them to live and sip lattes while discussing how great a Stalin wasn't that bad really.
>>7464184
>Stalin
>bad
Nice spook
>>7464195
>Stalin
>not so spooky people literally turn into spooks around him
>>7464203
Why did he add a person to the picture? :o
He must really not want his friends to leave out. What a nice guy! ^_^
>>7464184
the situationists hated the ussr btw
>>7464213
*to feel left out
>>7463454
Will Self is into this
>>7464213
the story was that guy was really excited about going for a day out with his good buddies but he ended up catching a cold so Stalin sent him this with a get well card saying "wish you were here" which is incidentally where Pink Floyd takes the album name from.
>>7464226
>The situationists were in most respects the same as garden variety self-indulgent leftists though.
i don't necessarily disagree (though they definitely had some interesting ideas), i just felt the need to clarify.
In my opinion, psychogeography a prime example of how the spectacle has acquired control of the forces that go against it... Deliberately searching out "authentic experiences" is something Debord should have caught as engaging in the spectacle.
In any case, the only way to "fight" the spectacle is just by not participating in society at all. Your indifference/noninterest/nonivolvemebt in the affirmation or sanitized negation of the spectacle is what kills it.
>>7463464
I walk terminates in a striated fashion though. Dérive by contrast implies smooth, intensive entry and departure from the psychogeographical space where at no point along the journey is it possible to say that you are definitively on a walk, a dérive, or even both; consequent of the journey existing as a mixture of the distance travelled but also the affective environments experienced and the unique psychological phenomena only producible by the particular sequence of those environments, it is indistinguishable from a walk, but this indistinguishability is what makes it a dérive.
>>7464184
oh, it's you again
>>7464299
Yeah, that makes sense. Some recent strains of anti-political thought (Baedan, Endnotes) seem to advocate for an end to all dialogue with the State or within the spectacle. What makes me paranoid is that even if you took that idea and brought it to its most extreme conclusion (living off-grid in the Amazon or Canadian wilderness), there would still be ways in which the system could find you. I have a feeling that people who aim to achieve a separate existence outside of society will become the unintentional stars to future reality TV showd filmed by covert drones for the masses to enjoy a la The Truman Show.
>>7464362
so resistance is futile and we've already lost, basically?
>>7463454
>>7464482
I wish I had checked my spelling if I had known this was gonna be reproduced in future Situationist threads.
>>7464362
I think you misunderstand what Endnotes is talking about when they talk about communisation. It's not about subtracting oneself from society in such a base manner, its about actively attempting to subvert value-production relations into non-value oriented social activities. Though their almost complete withdrawal from the worker and embrace of surplus populations as revolutionary subjects (for all their critique of the notion of a revolutionary subject) makes communism pretty much unintelligible in a form that isn't just a strange repetition of pre-primitive accumulation yearnings.
All of you are fetishizing capital to an extreme degree. Capital is just M-C(M-lp; M-mp)...P...C'-M'.M and so on. It's not some pseudo-Hegelian spirit, not some metaphysical system that's out to get you. It's a form of social production that takes the form of concrete production to produce the most abstract thing possible--value congealed into money.
Read Volume II and see how messy things get when you start to read the concrete into capital.
>>7464312
>it is indistinguishable from a walk, but this indistinguishability is what makes it a dérive
>your refutation of my point proves it
>>7464299
Debord himself knew this, if you read his notes on SotS, just before his suicide, he argues that the moment the book was out, it had been recuperated, though the SI's techniques could be adapted and changed into something new.
>>7464465
Revolution is still a possibility.
Also, as naive as it may look, Hakim Bey presents a interesting alternative in his TAZs, even though the idea of TAZs has one way or another been coopted, they still work as a nomadic experience (I'd also recommend you Constant's New Babylon and Milton Machado's History of the Future)
>>7464602
But doesn't capital in late capitalism turn into a "pseudo-Hegelian spirit" - the quotes here denote no sarcasm, just a humble question. The way I see it, the Spectacle becomes not only the current mediation, but also, the end game of all society, the generation of more Spectacle as the fuel to even more Spectacle, and so on.
I'm sort of sleepy right now, but a way to simplify it would be: Spectacle is the history and a substitution to the end of history, as we're living it right now.
Thisc isva troll post plz ignote
>>7463454
isn't this just rehashed Baudelaire for edgy po-mo bobos?
yea im a flaneur but i dont brag about it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNGskCNrBHY
also auge - non places
![orbital[1].jpg](https://i.imgur.com/lqxOwkz.jpg "orbital[1].jpg")
>>7465802
also good radio programme exploring london
https://venturesintopography.wordpress.com/podcasts/
Threads like these just show how anti-intellectual /lit/ is, also shame on you, OP, as if one could understand the entire ideology behind the french situationists just by a couple of wikipedia quotes. But that understanding is what you need to understand psychogeography
>>7465835
>But that understanding is what you need to understand psychogeography
What's even the point of it then?
>>7465849
What's the point of your question? It's a theory, it proposes a new way of thinking and urban organization within the context of situationism. What point is there supposed to be?
>>7465835
You may as well condemn the whole internet while you're at it
>>7465822
see also: robinson in space, allen fisher
>>7465857
How is walking theory?
>>7465903
walking =/= psychogeography
>>7465908
I didn't claim that.
>>7465917
Psychogeography is not a theory about walking. Thus your question ''how is walking theory?'' makes no sense.
just read some henri lefebvre senpai
>>7465923
Since you're too stupid to undrstand words: How is psychogeography theory and not practice?
>>7465979
It's a theory about a particular practice.
I don't like the theory part tho.
>>7464465
Yes. Mass suicide is the way to go.
>>7464312
>it is indistinguishable from a walk, but this indistinguishability is what makes it a dérive.
Care to develop?
