ARTIFICIAL HELLS

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Je participe, tu participes, il participe . . .
With its roots in Dada excursions and Surrealist nocturnal strolls, the
dérive, or goal- less ‘drifting’, was employed by artists and writers associated
with the Situationist International (SI) from the early 1950s to the late
’60s as a form of behavioural disorientation. Best undertaken during
daylight hours, and in groups of two or three like- minded people, the dérive
was a crucial research tool in the Situationist para- discipline of ‘psychogeography’,
the study of the effects of a given environment on the emotions
and behaviour of individuals. As a mode of increasing one’s awareness of
(specifically urban) surroundings, the dérive differed from Surrealist
wandering in that it placed less emphasis on automatism and the individual
unconscious. Rather than being an end in itself, the dérive was a form of
data- gathering for Situationist ‘unitary urbanism’, an attempt to undo and
move beyond what they saw as the disciplining, homogenising and ultimately
dehumanising effect of modernist forms of urban high- rise living,
exemplified by the modular architecture of Le Corbusier. 1
From an art historical perspective, the dérive offers very little for visual
analysis. Written accounts, which Debord described as ‘passwords to this
great game’, tend to be variable in their usefulness. 2 An early report from
1953 describes Debord undertaking an ‘extended dérive’ with Gilles Ivain
and Gaetan Langlais; this amounts to little more than hanging around in
bars on New Year’s Eve, speaking loudly to aggravate the other customers
until Debord becomes ‘dead drunk’; after this, Ivain ‘continues alone for a
few hours with a similarly marked success’. 3 New Year’s Day carries on in
much the same fashion, but in a Jewish bar. The report of 6 March 1956 is
more in keeping with what one might hope to find in a dérive: Debord and
Gil Wolman drift north from the rue des Jardins- Paul and find an abandoned
rotunda by Claude- Nicolas Ledoux. 4 They continue to drift around
the district of Aubervilliers, taking in a bar, and end the dérive when it gets
dark. Although this particular dérive is described as being ‘of little interest
of such’, it is strikingly flaneurial, in contrast to the overtly critical and
political tenor of other Situationist texts. 5 Other psychogeographical
reports are more analytical, if less vividly narrative, such as Abdelhafid
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